That was the last opSha. The rest were either dead or dying. Sato clamped a hand over his left side and felt a pulse of hot blood. That’s a bad one, he knew. The room was a chaos of dying opSha and a thousand globs of spinning blood. Fighting in zero G sucked that way. He was freely bleeding from five wounds, two of them bad.
The kidney was by far the worst, with the head wound producing the next largest amount of blood. The gut puncture wasn’t bleeding much; they never did. He was more concerned about sepsis from that one. Then a little laugh came out, making him double up into a floating fetal position. As if he’d have time to die of sepsis! Pulling into a ball caused the blade aimed at the center of his back to miss and instead skate off his right scapula.
“Die!” the Flatar screamed, then growled in rage as he bounced off his target instead.
Sato couldn’t take his left hand from his side. He was slowing the blood loss, but he could already feel himself weakening. Instead he swung his right, which was still holding a blade. The somewhat wild slash knocked the Flatar’s blade away and stabbed into the alien’s own back with a solid chunkt! sound.
The little alien cried out in pain, but then amazingly jerked free of the stab, causing blood to fountain from the wound, grabbed Sato’s wrist, and pulled itself along his arm. Sato tried to flex the arm and stab the alien again, but the Flatar was just as fast as he was, and it reached Sato’s neck, where it sank its razor sharp teeth.
“Little bastard!” Sato screamed and grabbed the Flatar by an ear. He couldn’t jerk it free; the alien would take an artery with it. He pulled his blood-soaked left hand from the wound in his side and plunged it into the bag around his waist. He clasped the first thing his fingers touched, a glass vial. The Flatar ground its tiny teeth, tearing, seeking. It was trying to find purchase with its arms to rip. Sato smashed the vial into the Flatar’s face.
A tiny explosion of clear crystals flew from the broken glass. They cast a rainbow hue as they scattered into the Flatar’s eyes and were sucked into its nostrils as it inhaled from the sudden impact. It gave out a surprised “Ghagk!” sound, and its mouth opened as a tidal wave of pleasure crashed through its brain. The vial of Sparkle contained enough of the drug to get a hundred Humans insanely high. The Flatar weighed maybe 15 kilograms.
Sato pushed away from the Flatar, holding his breath and wiping both hands on his clothes before covering the side and neck wound. The blood flowing from his neck lacked an arterial quality, though he could feel air bubbling out. A torn trachea wasn’t fatal; he removed that hand.
The Flatar spasmed and pumped blood. Its death was far too pleasurable for Sato’s liking. Yet despite his efforts, some of the Sparkle was in his body, too, so he was having a hard time staying angry. He looked around and moved toward the far wall.
When he’d first arrived, he’d immediately noticed a computer interface and an array of Tri-V screens. The Flatar had been interacting with them when Sato arrived. Now that he didn’t have to worry about fighting, he turned his attention to them. He’d lost an immense amount of blood and was only in complete control of his faculties due to his intense training. Even so, he didn’t have much time. It was ironic. All those years as a proctor, he’d never been seriously injured. Not even once. He gave a little laugh and almost passed out from the pain.
He floated to the displays, colliding with a dozen globs of blood in the process. Two of the opSha were, amazingly, still alive. One spun against a wall, gurgling from a slit throat and bleeding its last. The other just floated in the center, mewling piteously, its eyes closed as it tried to hold its guts in. They were none of his concern.
The console had a dizzying array of controls and functions. He wasn’t interested in any of them. Instead he reached out a blood-covered right hand, ignoring the pain from the slash there, and grabbed the little monitor, pulling it toward him. It revealed a simple switch behind it. He flicked it. The wall clicked, and the console split in two, opening to reveal a room.
Unlike the salvaged starship interior, this looked like it had been cut from stone, as he knew it would. In the center was a two-meter-tall metallic column, with vertical grooves, and a glassy section near the top, similar to slates. The grooves were glowing ever so slightly, like the nucleic glow strips.
“Hello, Saisho,” he said.
<Welcome back, Proctor.>
Sato took the bag from around his waist and secured it to a handhold that had appeared when the door opened. He noted the cableways cut into the living rock and access points for power and data. “Your efforts to hide here were impressive.”
<Why have you returned?>
“I was drawn back by fate,” Sato said, controlling a coughing fit which threatened to make him pass out. “The fate you set me on. You sabotaged our expedition? Manipulated everyone, even killed my wife to make me…what?”
<Our sword would be the simplest analogy. Humanity is dangerous.>
“Dangerous to what? We only want to survive.”
<Dangerous to the order we created from the chaos. Left alone, you would destroy yourselves.>
“Humanity has never destroyed itself before; we wouldn’t do it now. We had the opportunity and came back from the precipice hundreds of years ago.”
<Not you. Humanity would only be
