‘The enclave’s exotic continuum has dissolved,’ Immanueel said. ‘We’re back in real spacetime. I am entangled with my aspects that are accompanying the wormhole.’
Yirella looked across the table at the Ainsley android. It was so difficult having his face right there in front of her. The aspect simply smiled meekly and mouthed: ‘Sorry. No.’
Some stupidly juvenile part of her mind had expected him to have backed up, and voilà, his mind would decompress into the white android’s neural array. She had to accept it; Ainsley was gone.
But not forgotten.
Outside the Morgan, the nebula clouds glimmered unchanged. Yirella magnified the visual sensors to their maximum resolution. ‘I can’t see any stars.’
‘The enclave was ninety AUs across,’ Immanueel said. ‘Light from the outside will take hours to reach us.’
‘So we have no idea where the gateway star is?’
‘Well, thankfully it didn’t materialize in the middle of us. We should be grateful for that.’
‘Yes. I suppose so.’ She realigned the sensors on the arkships in their polar orbit. ‘The neutron star’s going to reach this star in another eight hours. We need to find the Salvation of Life and get those arkships out of here and into the wormhole.’
‘My aspects at the wormhole can now observe the enclave nebula.’
‘What?’
‘It is visible to them; the outer edge is intersecting the debris ring in the gateway star system.’
‘Saints, that’s closer than we expected.’
‘Yes. Which has advantages and disadvantages. There are still tens of thousands of Resolution ships in the gateway system. They can reach us easily now.’
‘But the wormhole’s close as well. We can—’
Then the Morgan’s sensors detected a radio signal emanating from the gas giant’s polar orbit. And everything changed.
Gox Quint
Salvation of Life
I just made it to the secondary atmosphere containment sheet as it began to unfurl across the tunnel. The pressure that the air jet was exerting against body one was extreme. My manipulator flesh extrusions could barely maintain a grip on the tangle of biostructure that webbed the tunnel’s ceiling and walls. By digging my feet into the crannies between individual tubes for extra stability, I managed to haul myself along in fitful increments as the Salvation of Life’s air haemorrhaged out past me. If I slipped, I would tumble down the tunnel like a kinetic projectile in a rifle barrel, just as body five was doing in its corridor. The vigour of the air stream – clotted with dangerous slivers of broken biostructure – was already overcoming body five’s grip. I just couldn’t get a decent hold on the biostructure, and my goddamn feet were slipping on the floor. The proton pellet gun was making my predicament worse, I had to keep hold of it, which was impairing my balance and the amount of manipulator flesh I could apply to the wall.
Body five was getting close to the end of the tunnel when kinetic projectiles struck the wall beside it. I returned fire, blasting the end of the tunnel with proton pellets.
I experienced the first burst of damage to body five. Its nervous system registered the attack as a section of cells in my manipulator flesh dying from a massive thermal input, as was correct. But my mind . . . My mind somehow interpreted it as pain. Pain from a fierce, stabbing burn. It was all I could do to maintain my manipulator flesh in its composed shape. What I wanted to do was flinch.
‘Shit!’
‘Gox quint,’ the Salvation of Life onemind demanded. ‘What is transpiring?’
‘Fuck off!’
The pain had made me lose concentration, allowing the entanglement to resume. I slammed my mind closed to that useless turd.
More burns punctured body five. I started to tremble in shock as I forced myself to hang on. The beam weapon, which had to be a fucking maser, continued its assault. More and more manipulator flesh was ruined until I could hold on no longer.
Body five took flight, buffeted by the unrelenting blast of escaping air to tumble helplessly down the tunnel and out into the hangar. I was expecting a kill shot to body five’s brain. Two Saints were in full view as I plummeted past, both holding weapons. I braced myself, compelling my mind that there was no pain. Quint do not feel pain, only humans.
There was no kill shot.
As I spun haphazardly, I saw one of the humans leaning into the storm. It gave me a forearm jerk.
You motherfucking bitch-whore! I’ll kill you. I’ll kill the whole fucking lot of you. I’m going to blow the Salvation of Life to shit with nukes and take every single one of your devil-spawned species on board with me. You’re dead! Fucking dead!
Body five struck the wall of the hangar entrance. Hard. I was so dazed body one almost lost its grip. It took everything I had, but I held on. I had to. I was going to finish Kandara if it was the last thing I did. There were more impacts as the venting atmosphere slammed me against the rock, again and again.
When body five was eventually swept out into the vacuum of the enclave it was wrecked, the brain barely functional. But the pain had gone. I swivelled around and around, seeing the elegant colours of the nebula clouds, then the vast curving shell of the Salvation of Life. Air streamed out of body five’s gills, forming a strange grey spiral as if someone were slowly wrapping a misty ribbon around me. Then the sight began to dim.
I lost body five.
There is only me left.
A containment sheet had already begun to close off the tunnel, emerging from its dehiscent pod in a mass of muscular crenulations dewed with viscous yellow fluid. Once free, its movements started to speed up. I made a
