Callum studied the young man intently; there was something not quite right about the features that he couldn’t define. Head too . . . wide? Or maybe the thick neck was too short? He gave up trying to work it out and unlocked his own helmet.
‘It’s really you,’ Dellian said. ‘Saint Callum.’
Yuri and the others took their helmets off, and Dellian stared around with a dazed expression, then started crying.
‘Come on,’ an embarrassed Callum said. ‘We’re not that bad looking.’
‘You don’t understand,’ Dellian said, grimacing as if he was in pain. ‘I saw the Avenging Heretic explode. We thought you were all dead.’
‘You saw it?’ a frowning Jessika asked.
‘Yeah. I kind of got neurovirused by a onemind. That image was part of breaking me.’
‘Well, fuck,’ Yuri grunted. ‘So you’ve been fighting the Olyix for a while, then?’
‘All my life. All of us have. And you were our inspiration, the five of you – our Saints. What you did, sacrificing everything to challenge the Olyix, it has been our guidance since our ancestors fled Earth. I’m so sorry we didn’t get here in time to save Saint Alik.’
‘Saint Alik,’ Kandara said with a wry smirk. ‘How about that?’
‘You know what he’d say about it, don’t you?’ Yuri said.
‘What?’ Dellian asked.
‘He’d be very honoured,’ Callum said quickly, before Yuri could reveal Alik’s true opinion.
‘Uh, we need to get you to the Morgan now,’ Dellian said. ‘It’ll be safer for you, and Saint Callum can get his arm treated in one of our clinics. I have to go and lead my squad into the Salvation of Life. We’re part of the clean-out phase.’
‘Clean-out?’
Dellian’s guileless face hardened. ‘Yirella is dealing with the onemind, but we’re going to exterminate the quint on board.’
Callum shrugged, which made him wince. ‘Okay then.’
A portal expanded at the far end of the cluttered chamber. ‘I’d like to talk to you,’ Dellian said. ‘Afterwards. If you don’t mind.’
‘Sure.’
So they went through the portal. It was like walking back into a corporate headquarters, though perhaps the walls were whiter than any Connexion office block, the air filtering not so sterile. And the people . . . who weren’t people, in the biological sense. They were greeted by epicene androids with black skin, a good half-metre taller than even Yuri. The androids were all called Yirella, which didn’t help clarify anything. But they showed Callum and the others to a clinic. That at least was reassuringly normal, though the medical equipment was a lot smaller and sleeker than anything he’d seen before.
Several other bays were occupied. Callum was sitting on a bed opposite a pair of amazingly old women. Even back on Earth in his time, only the poorest people had ever looked that old.
‘What happened to them?’ he asked the two androids helping to remove his spacesuit.
‘Victims of war,’ one of the androids replied. ‘Fighting the Olyix meant a lot of sacrifices. I wasn’t expecting it to be so . . . brutal. It has been very personal for me.’
‘Yeah. I’m starting to realize just how much I’ve left behind. We really are time travellers, aren’t we?’
The Yirella android who had just removed the protective balloon from his arm nodded thoughtfully. ‘Yes, I suppose so. Though it is a one-way trip, I’m afraid,’ she said.
Callum couldn’t actually look at his arm; the damage and protruding bone made him feel sick. Another android appeared, white, and smaller than the black ones, with an anatomy that was definitely male. It even wore a pair of green shorts. It was holding a long blue sleeve that looked as if it had been knitted out of fat silk.
‘What’s that?’ he asked, then looked at the android’s face. ‘Ainsley?’
‘Not any more,’ the white android said. ‘Sorry, I’m also Yirella. I just thought it would be more reassuring for you to have a familiar-looking aspect in a medical environment. This must all be very disorienting.’
‘Yeah, well, you’re not wrong there. This – none of this – is how I expected our mission to end.’
‘What were you expecting?’
‘Not to get this far, frankly. I’m still suspicious that this is a dream, and my brain is really in an Olyix cocoon.’
‘Trust me, you’re not.’
He lay back as the android with Ainsley’s face gently slipped the blue sleeve over his arm, plugging its tubes and cables into a silver pillar at the top of the bed. His phantom pain finally vanished as the sleeve inflated; he sighed in relief. The tubes began to sway as fluids flowed along them. One was a horrible brown colour. He looked away again.
‘So what happens now?’ he asked.
‘My other aspects are dealing with the Salvation of Life onemind.’
‘Dealing with?’
‘Killing it. I need to take control of the Salvation’s main systems so we can maintain the cocoons.’
‘There are other arkships carrying human cocoons. Five, I think.’
‘I know. The armada is already engaging them, as it is all the Olyix ships here. There are thousands of different species imprisoned in cocoons or their equivalent. We have to save them all. It is our duty and honour to do so. We’re going to take them all with us, back across the galaxy to the expansion wavefront.’
That took Callum a moment to process. ‘Do you have that kind of . . . capacity?’
‘Just. We have taken more losses than expected. But the corpus armada prevails. An aspect will replace each onemind.’
‘Er, aspect?’
‘Corpus humans are people who have divided their minds into many aspects, each of which resides in a different vessel – biological bodies, quantum arrays, machines, warships . . .’
‘Androids.’ He was having trouble accepting what she was saying. Too much strangeness.
‘Some, yes. Now their aspects are starting to occupy the arkships as their oneminds are eliminated. And very soon we will have to leave.’
‘I know; you brought a neutron star with you. It’s going to hit this star, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. And it will soon turn nova, which in
