“Je-zus fucking wept!” Alik snarled. He turned to confront Yuri. “We have to go. Now! We have to get back to the portal and warn Alpha Defense.”

“We certainly do,” Yuri said.

“How the fuck are you so calm about this?”

Smiling, Yuri took a dark ten-centimeter disk from his pocket and placed it on the floor. “Thread it,” he said loudly.

Callum peered at the disk’s eerily black surface and grinned. “I taught you well.”

Yuri gave him the finger as a slim rectangular portal slid up from the disk.

“You son of a bitch,” Alik grunted.

A wider rectangle was threading out. Callum and Loi deployed the short legs on its back, readying it to thread a full-size portal door. “Old times,” Callum said.

“No,” Jessika told him. “They are over. Forever.”

“Ainsley and Emilja are going to love talking to you,” he told her.

“Good. I have a lot to tell them.”

Jio-Feriton Quint

JIO-FERITON QUINT

THE SALVATION OF LIFE, JUNE 26, 2204

The Olyix do not have pain. We eradicated it from our new bodies when we elevated to them at the beginning of our pilgrimage to the End of the Universe.

But our human body, Jio-Feriton, experienced a ferocious spike of pain impulses as the female alien’s axe blade smashed into our skull. We were attuned to human thought routines, enabling our responses and reactions to emulate original Feriton Kayne without arousing suspicion.

The nerve signals from the blade cutting into our strange Jio-Feriton flesh and bone was interpreted correctly. It was agony.

Our remaining four Olyix bodies temporarily lost control of their limb function. We wanted to cry, but we had no tear ducts. We wanted to scream, but we had no vocal cords. We wanted—we yearned—for the pain to end. That was swiftly granted.

Our Jio-Feriton body died. Its mindfunction vanished from our entangled essence. We had experienced single mindfunction loss hundreds of times before as we replaced an old body within the quint, but never like this. The rest of our bodies were almost paralyzed from the shock. We have no coping mechanism for such an experience. We have no endorphin override. Feriton’s legacy was an immediate craving for both these very human things.

Slowly, we regained equilibrium. Our thoughts first turned to replacing our Jio-Feriton body, to become full quint again. This was accompanied by regret at the loss we had just suffered. Regret is alien. Therefore we learned that absorbing alien thoughts to perform a subterfuge is dangerous; it detracts from our purity. We will not undertake such a task again.

We have no need to.

The Salvation of Life’s onemind queried us, its serene essence curious at our eccentric outburst of chaotic thoughts. “Explain the occurrence,” it asked.

“We are now four Jio. Our Jio-Feriton body was killed.”

“How?”

“The suspect human, Jessika Mye, inserted an axe into Jio-Feriton’s head, causing immediate fatal damage.”

“Why?”