Bitchy, Yuri thought.
And behind the cosy thoughts percolating through the ring was the greatest union of all: the fullmind. A summation of all that was Olyix. A loving guide, directing their destiny until they arrived at the end of time.
‘The priest-king,’ he said out loud.
‘Hey,’ Kandara announced. ‘It’s come back.’
‘What has?’ Yuri asked.
‘The odd quint.’
He pulled up the feed from the sensor clusters inside the hangar. Now that all the transport ships had gone, it seemed a lot bigger than it had on their voyage to the enclave. It was almost like viewing a still hologram, the thick weave of rootlike tubes clinging to the rock walls and ceiling, with meagre twigs sprouting slim leaves. Serpentine lines of bioluminescent cells embedded along the surface of the bark illuminated the big space in a uniform orange-tinted light that banished shadows.
The hangar hadn’t changed since the plethora of service creatures and armoured quint had searched it on the day the Avenging Heretic flew away on its doomed escape manoeuvre. Apart from once, when a quint visited and slowly walked around the whole area.
Now it was back.
‘What’s it doing?’ Callum asked.
The quint was standing in the middle of the hangar floor, its fat, disc-shaped body swaying in a ponderous circular rhythm as if it alone was hearing a slow dance beat. Yuri wondered if its golden annular eye was scanning around like an attentive radar sweep in time with the motion. Its skirt of flaccid manipulator flesh flopped about idly, though small peaks rose and fell along the rim without ever forming any real appendage. He watched the thickest of the five legs, ostensibly the leading one, flex with an almost nervous twitch, the kind a terrestrial animal would have as a precursor to a charge.
‘It’s . . . anxious?’ he ventured.
‘That’s a bunch of bullshit,’ Alik said. ‘I’d say it is stressed; angry about something.’
‘You can’t equate its body posture to ours,’ Jessika insisted.
‘Yeah? Tell me it’s not worked up about something. I know agitation when I see it.’
‘Fight-or-flight reflex,’ Kandara said. ‘I’m with Alik on this one.’
Yuri just managed to avoid giving Callum an amused glance at her loyal support. ‘It’s there for a reason. Everything they do has a reason. They don’t have our . . .’
‘Whimsy?’ Callum suggested. ‘Imagination? Poetry? Individuality? A soul?’
‘Sure. All of that crap. Jessika, anything you can determine about it from the onemind?’
‘I doubt it. The deliberations of a single quint are essentially lost in the onemind thoughtflow. Too small to matter. Only the sub-sub-sub-thought routines handle them.’
Before he could ask her to try, she’d closed her eyes, concentrating. Yuri returned his attention to the odd quint. Distinguishing between quint bodies was difficult; there were very few individual characteristics. Given they were all produced in a convener, with every cell in their body stitched together to a standard template, they should be identical. But they did have occasional blemishes, a scar, or differences in the faint colour striations inside the translucent manipulator flesh.
Everything their sensors viewed was recorded in a dedicated memory store. Yuri told his altme, Boris, to run a comparison.
‘It is not the same quint body that was here last time,’ his altme replied. ‘The manipulator flesh imperfections are different.’
‘But it’s behaving strangely, like the last one.’
‘Then it’s most likely to be the same quint, but this is a different one of its five physical bodies.’
‘Right.’
‘I have nothing,’ Jessika said, her tone thoughtful.
‘Okay,’ Yuri said. ‘Well, thanks for trying.’
‘No, you don’t understand. I can’t find the hangar – our hangar – in the onemind’s thoughtflow.’
‘Huh?’
‘Let me show you.’
Yuri closed his eyes and accepted the simulation. It wasn’t the bridge any more; she’d brought him into her own interface expression. He was immersed inside the onemind’s vast thoughtflow, literally inside a stream. A column of water that rushed past him, impulses from his skin telling him he was damp and cold. The rippling silver surface that was all around him was awash with poorly glimpsed images slipping past. He wanted to concentrate on them, but they were too fast and he couldn’t focus.
‘This is how you perceive the onemind thoughts?’ he asked.
‘Yes. Don’t you?’
‘No. This . . . I’m more haphazard.’ It made him wonder just how different her mind actually was. Maybe Kandara is right to be suspicious.
‘It’s just not here,’ Jessika said.
They broke through the surface like a spawning fish leaping upstream. Emerging into chambers within the arkship. Multiple jumps, none of them lasting a second. The new surroundings barely registering before they were gone again. The tunnels. Chambers filled with biomechanical systems. Skyscraper stacks of cocoons, tended by ugly service creatures. Gloomy caverns unused since leaving Earth. Hangars without ships. Hangars with ships – all of them similar. None of them their hangar.
Yuri jolted upright on his rock ledge, staring around intensely as his mind sought to reorient itself, place him where he should be in the universe. He sucked down air, as if he’d truly been underwater for too long.
Kandara was giving him a strange look. ‘You okay?’
He nodded, not quite trusting himself to speak.
‘There is nothing from our hangar,’ Jessika said calmly. ‘The impulses from every sensory cell in the hangar have somehow vanished before they reach any of the onemind’s most basic routines, and they certainly aren’t incorporated in its memory. We only know this because our sensor clusters can see the quint in there. Nothing else can.’
‘Did someone kill the nexus?’
‘This has nothing to do with the nexus,’ Jessika said. ‘If that was burned, then the neuralstratum would be denied over a much greater area. This blind spot is specific to our hangar and the passageways leading to it.’
‘Why, though?’ Callum asked.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, frowning. ‘Something has to be blocking the onemind’s perception.’
‘Another neurovirus?’ Alik asked in surprise. ‘There’s another dark-ops team on board?’
‘No way,’ Kandara said. ‘It took the combined resources of Alpha Defence and every settled world to get us on board. There is no second mission.’
‘Whatever
