Three more of the things came flailing along the corridor. He blasted each of them, then he, Eldlund and Lim arrived at the central compartment. It was a basic cylinder that ran the height of the ship, separated into three sections by simple walkway grids. Halfway up, in the centre of the walkway, was a two-metre-diameter sphere, held in place by ten radial poles. There must have been more than twenty of the Olyix creatures in there, of different sizes and varying lengths of tentacles. They were moving sluggishly as though they were drunk, and sensors didn’t see them carrying anything that resembled weapons. Loi and Eldlund opened fire. Ten seconds later, their armour suits were covered in ribbons of gore, the creatures were all dead, and the compartment’s walls had hundreds of fist-sized holes where the armour-piercing micro-harpoons had struck.
‘That makes it easy,’ Lim said. She began to scale the wall with the ease of a jazzed-up free-climber, using the holes to jam feet and hands in. If they weren’t big enough, she punched or kicked them until they were.
Loi used his suit sensors to watch the two corridors at the bottom of the compartment while Eldlund covered the three entrances at the top. The gale of cryogenic vapour had withered away, leaving everything in stark relief.
Lim reached the midsection walkway and swung onto it. If the transport ship’s onemind was alarmed at her presence, there was no physical sign of it. But Loi kept vigilant as the blood fizzing around his body turned to pure adrenalin. So Great-Grandfather Ainsley’s paranoia is hereditary, after all.
The tactical splash showed him that the nearly two dozen Olyix transport ships around Salt Lake City were now airborne. The surviving pair of Deliverance ships was lifting with them, their energy beams cutting apart the last barrage of missiles. Two hundred kilometres above them, a formation of cruisers swept eastwards, with a second formation following fifteen hundred kilometres behind. The gap between them was the one that the Olyix ships were aiming for. After two years analysing the flight capabilities of the transport ships, Strikeback had determined that over fifty per cent should be able to make it through that gap and continue to climb.
‘Starting extraction now,’ Lim announced.
Loi’s suit sensors zoomed in. Lim had placed a glossy black package on the surface of the sphere, next to one of the radial spokes. Its surface rippled as if it was composed of a particularly viscous liquid.
This was the part they were completely dependent on the Neána for. The aliens were the ones with the neurovirus, which they claimed couldn’t be used by humans. They had to rely on Lim and Jessika. Loi wanted to believe they’d pull through, but Kandara’s suspicions kept playing in his mind. So much had to be taken on trust. Our survival.
Lim’s gauntlet split open, and she pushed her right hand into the black surface and kept on going up to her wrist. ‘I’m in,’ she announced.
Loi scanned the corridors again. Nothing moved along them. He began to wonder what was in the other compartments. They’d never explored, never dispatched mobile sensors. This was a single-target mission – the most important one on Earth. Everything else was set up to facilitate this.
All Lim had to do was interface with the organic neural processor housed inside the sphere and load the neurovirus into it. Loi couldn’t help it; he began to draw up size comparisons. Even if the mass of the neural processors only took up half of the sphere, it would still be seven or eight times larger than Lim’s brain. So they didn’t just have to trust that the Neána were true allies; the neurovirus had to work perfectly as well – something that had been assembled in a Neána abode cluster unknown centuries ago, and probably longer than that. Which made him wonder how they knew so much about Olyix thought routines. Did they have captives they’d experimented on? That goes right against their supposed philosophy of hiding between the stars.
Soćko had promised them it would work. ‘I took out a transport ship’s onemind with it, remember?’
‘Got it!’ Lim exclaimed. She withdrew her hand carefully, and the gauntlet sealed up again. The surface of the package bowed inwards, then it flowed into the sphere as if it was being sucked in.
This part had always seemed the weirdest to Loi. The neurovirus had allowed Lim to copy the onemind’s identity patterns. But for the Avenging Heretic’s flight to succeed, they needed the specialist nodule of cells deep inside the transport ship’s neural processor, which were entangled with the Salvation of Life’s neuralstratum. If the armour suit wasn’t so heavy, he’d be tapping his feet with nervous impatience.
The black package emerged back out from the hole, and Lim plucked it off the sphere. Thirty seconds later she’d half clambered, half jumped back to the floor of the compartment.
‘Let’s go.’
‘Hallelujah!’ Eldlund exclaimed.
They hurried out, Eldlund taking point. Loi dropped a ten-decaton nuke on the compartment’s floor as he stepped into the corridor, set the
