“Yes,” he mumbled feebly. His mouth was an unfamiliar instrument. “Why?” he managed to ask.
The older genetech crouched down beside him. The scientist might have been a mountain once, but decades of erosion had left him shriveled, withered and craggy. “Our time has run out, Kai. You must leave this place while the path remains open.”
Kai coughed and more fluid wrestled its way out of his throat. “I need to get to the front lines. The war…”
The genetech placed a hand under Kai’s chin, and gently lifted his head. “There is no war,” he said. “All you hear is the last gasp of the dying.”
“It’s a funeral,” the other genetech said.
“How?”
The scientist shook his head as he spoke. “We lost at Sylus Gate, and the rest of our defenses collapsed in a cascade.”
The other said, “Locara, Asheth, Telarius Point, and finally here. Each one a total defeat.”
Kai looked down at his incomplete hand. The structure was in place, but patches of half-formed skin scarcely covered the lattice-work of muscle machinery. If his estimates were correct, that placed him in the eleventh day of incubation. His entire world had been conquered in just thirteen days.
His mind raced. “I’m still asleep,” he said.
The genetech said, “I hope you’re right, and that you soon wake.”
As the last word came out of the genetech’s mouth, the far end of the chamber exploded. Flames clawed through the wall, and spit forth shards of razor sharp metal.
Something clicked in Kai’s head and engineered instinct took over. He plotted the trajectory of every moving object in the chamber and launched into the air, twisting and contorting to avoid the shrapnel that ricocheted all around.
An instant later, the room was quiet once again, and Kai found himself crouched over the genetechs’ remains. The hail of metal had shred them to pieces, and their blood now mixed with the blue gestational fluid in swirls. In spirals.
“Go,” one of them gasped. “The lowest level. The machine waits.” Then he was gone.
Kai stuffed the bundle of clothes under his arm and ran. The tunnels leading away from the laboratory were twisted, warped, and empty except for the sound of his feet pounding across the stone floor and the rumble of approaching fire. He was running through a graveyard, and the graveyard was burning.
Level by level, he wound his way through the maze of corridors and descended deeper into the ground. All the while, sounds of the battle grew louder as one floor after the next was stripped away by the unstoppable fury of the invaders.
He reached the last subfloor and sprinted toward the central hub while the heavy bulkheads closed behind him, permanently sealing the crypt.
Then he was there, wherever there was. The room was another lab, this one bright white and circular. It was clean and totally untouched by the war that had demolished his planet. A sarcophagus-like capsule stood at its center amid an overgrowth of cables and machinery.
Kai wasn’t sure what to do next. He dug through the bundle of clothes until he found a mission-computer, a hollow metallic cylinder with an eery sheen, and he latched the device around his wrist like a shackle. Once closed, it adjusted itself to his arm and then he felt the familiar tingle of it interfacing with his nervous system.
The computer’s screen lit up and words began to scroll by, which he simultaneously heard echoed in the back of his head. Its voice was childlike and boisterous. “Initializing… Initialization complete. Greetings, Sinit Kai. You will be pleased to know that all of my systems are functioning at maximum efficiency.”
The older models weren’t so cloyingly personable. “Sure. Great,” he said as he slipped into his uniform. “What’s my mission?”
“You’re a rude one. No matter. Your mission is simple. You need only step into the capsule, and it will do the rest.”
Kai fastened the last of his buttons and tugged his jacket to make sure it was straight. The self-healing material of the uniform sealed itself against his half-formed skin, and the last of the pain disappeared. “I don’t follow. What does this capsule do?”
“How strange. I thought Sinit-class infiltrators were supposed to follow orders without question.”
“Things change,” Kai said. “And I seem to be the entire chain of command now.”
The computer took a moment to process that. “Well, if you absolutely must know, the capsule is an experimental transit system. There’s a significant chance it will deliver us to a distant star… or it may annihilate us in