eugenesis-text

‘Lucky he wasn’t a Cybertronian,’ said Quantax, leaving the trident to wobble in the wound. ‘Else
we’d all be taking turns.’
Death’s Head raised an optic cover and saw his own entrails.
[+++ Damage assessment pending +++ Activating internal repair program +++]
He could feel every wound, every severed connection, every shattered hydraulic. Carefully, he
released enough oil to form a shiny pool under his back and then quietly stemmed the flow. Selective
shutdown killed the pain, an optic cover sealed his eye and super-advanced servomotors begin re-knitting
his ravaged insides.
‘You’ve seen enough bloodshed for the day,’ Xenon said to the Sharkticon bystanders. ‘Return to
your assignments. Quantax, Rodern: stay behind and activate the others.’
Rodern leant over the life-support machine. ‘Xenon, do we really need to cart these three around’
‘Sevax, Jolup and Ryknia are veterans. Their status within the revised Quintesson hierarchy is
without question. If we can keep them alive within these units then it is our duty to do so.’
Rodern scowled and took his place on the rostrum alongside Xenon. If I’d lost my entire body in
battle I know I wouldn’t want to wake up inside a glass bauble, he thought to himself. I wouldn’t want to
be kept alive by stim-shocks and energon boosts. What a tenuous existence. What a mockery of life.
He knew the history. Sevax, Jolup and Ryknia had ended up like this after the abortive attack on the
Cybertronians in 2008: the CyberWar. He had overseen Project: Retrieval, organising stealth squads to
collect dying Quintessons from Earth and Cybertron. Any troops below the repair threshold were used to
help construct the base he was standing in now. At the end of the CyberWar (when the planet Quintesson
was just beginning to slide over the chrono-horizon of a temporal rift), the former Imperial Majestrix, Lord
Kledji, his War Minister-turned-Poet Laureate Sevax and a skeleton staff of Monarchists had boarded the
last transport ship and made a break for it.
Unfortunately, Kledji had overestimated the stability of the planet, and Quintesson had exploded
before his ship could get clear.
The thought of the ageing Majestrix being ripped to shreds still brought a smile to Rodern’s face.
When the retrieval teams found the ship’s remains floating through space there wasn’t anything of Kledji to
salvage. Not that he’d looked too hard.
Others, like Sevax, had been marginally more fortunate. Admittedly, most of his body had been
scraped from its bubbling endoskeleton in a well of shearing gravity, his brain module peeled from its
moorings by suction alone, but at least he’d survived. Rodern had only brought sycophants like Sevax back
to curry favour with Xenon, to prove that the Project was worthwhile. True enough, a promotion to
General soon followed.
As for Jolup and Ryknia – well, he had to admit he felt a grudging respect for them, or at least their
tactics. Jolup had masterminded the legendary Ibex ambush that had nearly wiped out a whole
Cybertronian faction. Ryknia had been his field officer. When the tide of battle had turned, the
Quintessons had retreated into space to rendezvous with the central fleet. The injured and dying were left
behind to rust into the battlefield – at least until it was safe enough to despatch a small stealth squad without
being detected. Jolup, Ryknia and a handful of grunts were eventually found, minus most of their bodies.
As newly crowned Majestrix and self-proclaimed saviour of the Quintesson race, Xenon had decided
to have Sevax, Jolup and Ryknia transferred to portable life-support. Rodern knew why: Xenon saw them
as his personal council, his learned advisors. Whenever they asked for new bodies – which was frequent
now that the Cargo was nearly ready for distribution – Xenon or his new favourite, the obsequious
Quantax, would tell them to be patient, to wait for the right time. Perhaps it was this assurance that kept
once-proud warriors like Jolup and Ryknia from requesting termination.
Jolup’s voice sounded flat and distorted as it was filtered through speakers. ‘I still don’t see why you
insist on shutting down our vocal synths. You can’t just switch us on and off when you feel like it.’
‘Your voices are superfluous unless I ask you to speak,’ snapped Xenon. ‘We need to conserve all the
energy we can. And incidentally, lieutenant, you are not in any position to complain.’
‘So why have we been wheeled out today’
‘Lord Xenon!’ Haxian stormed into the courtroom and clicked his heels. ‘The hypershuttle has been
disabled.’
‘Occupants’