The Stars Are Legion(29)

The twins crash into each other, smashing one another’s limbs. Aiju grabs hold of Anka, and as I spin out of reach, I see Anka’s suit rotting away, her leg throbbing with the bite of a three-pronged cephalopod.

Another projectile hits Aiju in the back so hard, it spins them both farther from the group, knocking them into their forgotten vehicles. They drift off into the black.

Suld holds out with a small group of security personnel. She’s leapt onto one of their forgotten vehicles and now turns it toward the advancing force. She fires off a hail of energy bursts so bright they hurt my eyes.

I smack into another body rolling behind me; one of the security women, her face twisted in death, the suit mostly rotten, clinging to her body in scraps. Hitting her body slows my momentum. I try to push off her to get back to the fray, but she is at least two hundred paces away now; the only reason she isn’t moving faster is because the world’s gravity will only let her get so far.

The assault force swarms Suld and the security holdouts, firing round after round of their cannons. They riddle the eight of them like fine paper, hurling their bodies in every direction.

I tangle with another body behind me, one still attached to a vehicle. I hook her arm into the organic tubing of the vehicle to keep me attached to it but remain motionless as the dead. Asphyxiated, half-suited Anka is tangled beside me. Her mouth is gaping open in death, eyes and lips and tongue slowly freezing.

I do not have to get close to know who the raiders are. I know those weapons. And the vehicles. The Bhavajas betrayed us, and Anat walked right into it. As I watch, three of them find Anat’s body. One takes her great iron fist. Another holds her still. A third brings up an energy weapon and fires it into Anat’s elbow, severing the iron arm from her flesh.

They shoot Anat in the head for good measure and push her body into orbit with the others. The lot of them raise their weapons and shake their arms, holding the trophy of Anat’s arm aloft.

When they buzz back around the wreckage they’ve wrought, I fix my stare straight ahead, knowing they will fire into anything that looks even remotely alive. Weapons are precious things, and the cephalopod bursts cost them. That’s what I’m counting on.

They fire at me anyway. One projectile clips my leg. I let my legs and torso jerk with the push of it but keep my arm hooked in the vehicle’s tubing.

I expect them to gather us all up into a net or tie us up into a caravan and recycle us. It crosses my mind that no one will leave this much good organic material to orbit some planet unless it is impossible to retrieve it, like the armies around the Mokshi.

I wait, breathing shallowly, as the sixty-odd-strong Bhavaja squad pokes and prods at the scattered wreckage of our party. After a long while, I allow myself a blink, and I see them engaged in a heated conversation in sign language. Did they get new orders?

Finally, the leaders break away, speeding back toward the rotten world. Their squad follows after them, leaving me and the dead to orbit the ruin.

I wonder if this is some trick and they’ve left someone behind to watch over us. But all I see is the dead that I’ve been told are my family, and for one terrible moment, I believe they are indeed my blood relations, and that everything I know is dead. I shake myself out of this thrall and pull myself onto Aiju’s vehicle. I try to start it.

But it’s dead. Just like everything else.

I swear and lean over to poke at the guts of it while Aiju’s dead face looks on. I can’t help but believe that if I can just remember everything, if I was just the whole person I should be, I could have not only seen this coming but convinced Anat of it too.

I find half of one of the tentacles twisted in the undercarriage of the vehicle. I carefully pull it out. Droplets of fuel snake from a torn hose. I press it closed with one finger but can’t see any deeper into the guts to find other problems. I long for one of the speculums back in the hangar. It would make this much easier.

What I’m missing is something to fix the leak in the tubing. I can’t just hold my hand in it. I search around and come up with nothing. Aiju’s body is still tangled with the vehicle on the other side. The rest of the bodies are strewn two hundred paces distant, slowly circling back around the world. Eventually, the inhabitants of some other world will find them and have a grand recycling event. I don’t intend to wait up here that long. My air will give out first. Won’t it? I don’t even know how long I can breathe out here in these suits.

I stare hard at Aiju’s accusing face and bared torso. There is, of course, an analog to the organic tubing of the vehicle in the human body.

I work off a piece of the outer shell of the vehicle and bash it with one hand until a sharp piece comes off. I take hold of Aiju’s body and plunge the piece into her frigid torso. I use both hands to tear open her body, which is not yet frozen through, only cold. I pull out the intestines and cut off a short section, squeezing out the waste.

Then I turn off the fuel line, unhook the organic tube, and slip the intestine over it before it freezes. A perfect fit, as if the vehicle is, indeed, patterned after human organs. I hook the fuel line back up and try starting it.

The vehicle comes to life, the green glowing control console blazing. I kick the vehicle forward, circling the detritus of my family once, wondering again why the squad has not netted them all up and brought them back to a Bhavaja world.

What can be more important than salvaging flesh and vehicle components? What are they off to do?