I've only seen a battlefield in training memories, felt the heat of a Jøran desert, the rumble of shuttles flying overhead and the shredded remains of kin and humans staining the sand red.
This is different. Not because it's in the middle of the Attrium, with the broken remnants of the giant plassteel dome overhead and the trunk of one of Aeotu's grappling cables erupting through deck. And not because the combatants are encased in envirosuits, helmets jammed over round and triangular heads alike. No, it's got nothing to do with that.
In the training memory, guns spat lances of energy, searing the flesh they didn't blow away, filling the air with the smell of cooking meat. Here, there's fire, the sharp beam of Franken-lasers, but instead of smoking flesh, there's the high-pitched screaming of fug, the fine grey of dead nanites saturating the atmosphere in little puffs of dust.
Grey-green and red alike, fighting, tearing. Humans and kin standing shoulder-to-shoulder, qwan riding on rucnarts, swarms of plasform-wrapped critters arrayed before them, and in my brain... Shards of ice and fire, daggers and claws and teeth, ripping at the eter, flowing along lines of yellow-gold, following it through the threads of the universe and sinking into fug.
And above it all, hovering just on the edge of my consciousness, is Grea.
Kuma! The word is mental is much as physical. I have a split second to turn, to slip back into the real world and see Mac, arms outstretched, like he's throwing something, before a wall of force knocks me off my feet.
My head hits the deck, rattles my brain. Stars burst in my vision. It's hard to tell which is the eter and which is real. Time slows, is molasses. In the eter there are days in which to see the bomb exploding over Mac, the thin plassteel dome expanding, the fire burst from inside pushing sharp, shining fragments of shit into the atmosphere. Tiny volcanos of blood erupt on Mac's chest, embed themselves in the space where I was standing.
Fear. Pain. They spew from Mac as he flies backward, the bomb's shockwave rippling his flesh.
Hunt is there, not just in my gut, but with me in the eter. A flat-faced sentinel at my back. Solid. Calm. Relentless.
Fug-armour is flowing over my body, the thrusters on my back drawing the heat from my bones even as new protrusions form over my arms, an incandescent vein throbbing over my shoulders to my forearms. The fug-blades snick out over my knuckles, but instead of the sharp grey-green, they're glowing yellow-white, heat coming off them in waves.
And then I'm racing across the deck, throwing myself into the fray. Hacking and slashing, left and right, not even sure what I'm slashing at, who I'm slashing at. Hunt has hold of my brain. On my shoulder, the golden web of Dude's control thrums under my skin, but Hunt isn't listening.
Not to me at least. I can hear Aeotu behind Hunt, not actual words but a buzz, and the sickness of before… It fills her up, makes me want to puke just touching it.
There's a wall of muscle on my left, and I'm on the deck rolling backward, finding my feet and coming up and under the sweep of h'Lott's forearms, dancing out of her reach. Then I'm slashing, but not at h'Lott, or the viyu rising out of the floor, thick spiky tendrils coming to my defence, tangling in the rucnart's legs. No, I'm slashing at a fist-sized sphere hurtling through the vacuum, and then another and another. They shatter under my blades, the spheres breaking apart, the contents a smoking ruin before it has a chance to bleed.
There are more traces of gold flying through the battle, critters in plasform bubbles defying gravity, hunting down the grey-green, smashing into it, kamikaze-style. Exploding on impact. The viyu seems to absorb it, the parts that do turning grey, crumbling to dust, the rest of it carrying on and then... Have you ever seen biopoison creep up a grow wall, seen the green leaves turn brown, watched them wither and die? That's what this is. Gold runs through the viyu like blood, traces of it gleaming in the light of Franken-throwers, and with every explosion, every new injection of poison Aeotu gets sicker.
I never thought of gold as a bad colour, you always think of red that way, or black or any of the hundred oozy, rotten shades of dank green and rank orange, but never gold. Now though... Now it makes my skin crawl, my stomach curdle. The viyu doesn't scream, not like it does when you hit it with flame, or when the viyusa digs in. Nope, it kind of whimpers as sickness rolls off it in waves of puke-yellow.
Hunt twists me out of the way as another critter bomb explodes at my feet. I'm leaping high, pulling fug-feet up to my chest, watching as some of that gold splatters against me.
Hunt keeps moving, keeps twisting and slashing, but there are warnings going off on the HUD, and that sickness? It's creeping up my toes, through my veins. My toes goes first, talons crumbling as I hit the deck, gold wrapping itself around my ankles, climbing higher— Dude's off my shoulder, scrambling down my body. All I can do is watch, heart in throat, wanting to scream "No".
Red is there before Dude, the viyusa erupting out of the deck, clamping me in place, jerking me off my feet. Hunt tries to keep fighting, blades swinging, but we're on the floor.
I'm expecting fire, expecting the viyusa to burn, to devour Dude. I'm not expecting it to chase the gold, to pass over the fuzzbutt like he's not there, even when the critter sinks teeth, talons and barbed tail into it. The gold is gone, eaten by the red, and my toes are rebuilding themselves, absorbing the red just like the inert fug.
I'm still staring at it when darkness explodes in the middle of the ruined Attrium, fire writhing around it.
Everything stops.
Guns, growls, the kins' icy daggers. Just. Stops.
The darkness unfurls, standing in a smooth, graceful motion, its fire becoming long tendrils of red, fanning around its feet like a cape. Dragging on the ground. At its edges, the fug, both red and green, rolls back, leaving a half-metre of scarred and broken deck in its wake.
The only thing that dares approach are the critter balls and they're swatted out of the air like bugs.
Grea stands in the midst of it, the focal point of all that darkness, all that fire. Purpose bleeds through the barrier between eter and the physical, staining the atmosphere a shining bronze.
She's not wearing a mask. The harsh glow of the battle plays across her face in harsh shadow and violent orange highlights, washing out her complexion, making the sharp lines of her cheekbones and the hollows of her cheeks stand out in stark relief. She's changed again since I last saw her, grown taller, gotten older, and I wonder how long she kept me in the dark place, wracking my body with pain.
Not long, little brother. Her eyes find mine, boring through my faceplate. Euiva needed an older body for what comes next. Pain echoes through the words, the memory of it laced with determination.
Is it my heart that chills or Aeotu's? It's not Hunt's, although there's a new whirring in the depths of my brain, calculations, vectors, numbers, strategies piling up in its consciousness, a sense of impending danger.
Why would Aeotu be afraid? And why would Euiva need Grea to be physically older?
The fear that shivers under my skin is all mine. Other emotions, though, the wonder, the joy and shock. Those are not mine. Those are carried on the colours of Mum and Dad's minds, of Mac's dad and the white/black of Onah. They splash against my back, trying to thaw that shiver, almost succeeding.
'Grea?' Mum's voice comes through my comms, echoing in my helmet.
I doubt Grea can hear her, not in vacuum, without comms to bridge vacuum. Of course, nothing's ever impossible.
Grea turns, facing Mum, a smile lighting her face, and I guess, if Grea's face still isn't a frozen block of flesh, if she's somehow immune to the vacuum, then hearing Mum despite the lack of comms isn't that far of a stretch.
Grea's mouth moves. There's no air, not even enough for her breath to frost, and yet... 'Hi Mum. Sorry about not coming to find you, but I had to do something.'
It's Dad's turn now. He clumps forward, not quite as graceful in his envirosuit as he usually is. 'Baby, what's going on?'
'I have to go, Dad, there's not much time, but Kuma knows, ask him.' She turns away, the red closing in tight around her, darkness following, but she pauses a moment before she's swallowed by it, and smiles at Dad. 'It's okay,' she says. 'We'll be done soon, but you should go now.'
There's a thud, a kind of muffled explosion, and then she's gone, disappeared through a new hole in the deck.
I'm over the edge of it, peering at the faint blue shimmer of emergency bulkheads lighting up the tunnel, my HUD scanning the hole. Ten decks, Grea just bored her way through all of Citlali's decks, not just one or two, and she did it like it was nothing, or like she was made of the same stuff as Aeotu's grappling cables.
I jump in after her. It's not an action I think about, and the moment my feet leave the deck I wonder if my fug-self can soak the damage, if falling forty-eight metres is the same as nine, or if I'm going to wind up with broken legs and my spine lodged in my brain. Probably something I should have figured out before the leap.
I have a nano-second to regret the impulse, and then warmth flares on my back. The thrusters.
Hunt is running numbers in the back of my brain. According to it and the HUD, there's enough power in them to prevent me from breaking every bone in my body. Armour is shifting, flowing from my torso and arms to my legs, just in case.
"Just in case" doesn't inspire confidence in Hunt's calculations.
Still. I only have seconds to regret my decision.
There's a jolt as I pass through the emergency bulkhead, an electric, biting ripple that starts in my toes and surges up my body, and then air is rushing past my face, lifting my hair. The armour is bulked around my lower body, just the thrusters attached to my back and a thin skeleton around my face, enough to support the HUD.
Numbers are counting down. And there's the bottom of the shaft, highlighted in red and yellow. The thrusters are firing, slowing my descent, but the numbers on my HUD are still high, still make my gut clench with the expectation of pain, even as they leach all the energy from my bones. Impact comes both sooner and later than I expect. The deck meets my feet in slow-motion, my knees bending, force rushing up my legs, making the armour ripple. Warnings are screaming, force meters red to rival the emergency lights, but there's no pain. No crunch of bones, no tear of muscles. Just fug, cracking with a wet scrittch, turning grey, crumbing to dust as the nanites die.
Weight falls off my back, the thrusters joining the pile of dead fug at my feet.
I follow it, collapsing to the cold deck, exhaustion turning my bones to steelcrete, my muscles to biogel, pulling my eyes closed. It's cold, I know it's cold because icicles are forming in my nose, clogging up my airways, but I can't summon the energy to get up.
Maybe jumping after Grea wasn't such a good idea.
Grea. I reach for her. She's ahead of me, racing down the corridor, darkness and viyusa propelling her faster than any human can move on their own.
I feel her stop, feel her turn and look down the corridor, straight through the curve of the bulkhead. For a moment it's as if she's standing right there, the tendrils of viyusa brushing against my sides, skittering away from my armour like it hurts.
She hesitates, leans forward, and warmth springs in my chest – she's coming back for me – but then someone else tugs at her psyche. It's faint, weak, but insistent, powerful with urgency, with desperation.
Grea turns away, purpose driving her from me.
Grea! My own desperation, the first stirrings of fear, colour the call.
My twin, my other half, ignores it. And then she's gone. Just. Gone.
Alone. Cold.
I should be used to it, should have inured myself to the creeping chill, to the numbness as ice forms in my blood, slows my heart, makes it hard to remember why I'm here. And yet… and yet this is different, this is a dagger ripping my heart in two. This is a piece of myself gone. Lost. Torn away. Stolen.
This is unacceptable.
Brother.
Aeotu crouches beside me, the dark, sleek shadow looking so much like Mac in his armour, except it's not him. The kaleidoscope dances under Aeotu's skin, purple, green, blue, the colours I have no names for, no ability to describe, twisting and turning. Whorls and lines sucking me in, talking to me, to Hunt. Sharing secrets and whispering lies. Endless. Infinite. I can see the void in her skin, the infinite cold of FTL, the possibility of the universe.
Brother. She reaches into my back, through flesh and bone and fug, her sleek, talon-like fingers wrapping around my heart. And I realise, as those deadly claws pierce the muscle, that she used the male pronoun. Up. Lightning, the kaleidoscope jumpstarting my heart, pumping energy into my blood, my bones melting, my marrow throbbing.
I'm on my feet. Fug is flowing over my flesh, the grey-green rippled with the yellow of the neo-critters, encasing my feet, my knees, hiding the gold of Jørgen-me under the armour of the new me. The one with claws that tear into steelcrete, with a miniature sun on his back and blades sheathed in his arms. That Kuma, the one tearing down the corridor, mind stretching ahead, finding Grea, slipping into her mind, pushing past the shock, sharing her eyes as she powers up the shuttle. Sensing the other, Euiva, as it whispers in Grea's ear.
Don't. The word is mine.
I have to. There is a world behind that response, centuries of loneliness and pain, of floating in the void, an abandoned hull leaking atmosphere. Of emotions that bubble up from deep within, as alien as the dark swirl of colour it rises out of, as powerful as a sun.
Sister. Aeotu speaks through me, her voice reaching through the connection that is Kuma/Grea to speak to the thing on the other side.
Grea jerks, tries to rip herself away, but I'm holding tight. It can't have you, I say.
A denial, violent, angry. It reaches through Grea like Aeotu reaches through me. Hooks into the connection. Cold. Hard.
Aeotu screams.
I scream with her.
Grea rips away. Is gone.
I skid through the shuttle bay doors on my knees, pain stealing my coordination. The doors snap closed. Lights are flashing, a hazard holo is in my face. The sleek, egg-shape of the shuttle is rising, hovering over the deck before it turns, thrusters firing white hot, the hover jets creating a mini tornado, sweeping the crumbled remnants of deck and scaffolding.
The outer doors open. The little atmosphere in the hangar is sucked into space, taking me with it.
I flip on my belly, ram claws the length of my forearm into the deck, picture hooks forming on the ends, holding me in place even as the rush of atmosphere lifts my body from the deck.
The shuttle is pointed at the outer airlock, toward the dark tunnel of the ice hull.
Grea. I try again.
Euiva encases my twin; my call bounces off.
Thrusters fire.
The shuttle is gone.