The medusas were sisters, she was sure of that. Fire into one of them, and they all came running. They hit hard when defending one of their own. Saraghina had never seen them defend anything else. Up there on the rocky flat, she would be safe until her teammate arrived.
There was a time when Saraghina also had a sense of family, when she was very young. It was probably a very unlikely thing for an opifex who had been birthed the most natural way for the breed, by the Omni-Tek corporation in a tank of synthetic amniotic fluid along with a hundred others. The facility where they were all raised was nice enough, and Saraghina had made two close friends by the names of Cabiria and Ugarte. Even nicer was Gena G., one of the earliest sitters that the girls remembered. Gena was so pretty and sweet and kept talking about her family, which she thought was probably the greatest thing in the world. The girls liked this idea of "family" even though they only thing they really knew about it was that some days her family meant that Gena wouldn't be around to play with them, but they decided to try it anyway. They heard that sometimes the solitus kids would cut themselves and be "blood brothers", but they all agreed that they couldn't stand the sight of blood and they couldn't be brothers anyhow, so sisterhood was made with a promise and a hand gesture. The sisters had to improvise a lot, but for years they stayed close and protected one another from the others that shuffled past them in the well-lit hallways.
It was well over a decade later when things started to fall apart for the three, just after they had to decide their career paths in their late teens. Ugarte was adamant that they would all be fixers and serve the corporation in the way it needed most. Saraghina had always been angered by her uncontrollable tendency to steal things out of people's pockets and could not bring herself to do this; she became an engineer, hoping to keep her hands busy in a more productive way. Her talents had been noticed by the facility's higher-ups, and it was rumored that Philip Ross himself was funding her latest project, even though she had been working on nothing more glamorous than a stationary waste disposal unit.
The persisting rumors made some of the others in the facility openly jealous of Saraghina, but Ugarte was fearsome enough to enforce in them a begrudging silence around Saraghina if not actual civility; and it held until one evening while Saraghina was working late, another promising young fixer ran into the workshop, loosened several screws on the waste disposal unit and ran back out. The steel rebar that had been held in place by those screws shot out of the machine and got stuck in the floor, impaling Saraghina's pelvic girdle on its way.
Saraghina remembered being nailed to the floor by the rebar, holding it in place with both hands and breathing badly as Cabiria stroked her cheek and asked her not to go yet. An Omni-Med technician came running in waving a pistol to deposit a bullet in the base of Saraghina's skull. Ugarte screamed "NONE OF US ARE INSURED YET YOU CHROMIUM-PLATED MOTHERF--KER" at the technician just as Saraghina passed out. Saraghina saw the fixer that had sabotaged her machine a few days after her return from Omni-Med, missing his right thumb, and after that she never saw him again. She had heard that he ended up a beggar on an outworld Omni-Tek colony, but this is only what Ugarte told her.
Saraghina supposed that her teammate must have finished getting the supplies by now.
Ugarte never forgave Saraghina for choosing machines over speed, and the incident with the fixer and the rebar meant that Saraghina had to endure even more of Ugarte's seemingly endless tirades. Generally happy with her choice, Saraghina was only troubled by one aspect of her profession. To create a distance and then close it was a big responsibility, and not one she knew of when she chose her path. It was all scientifically sound, of course, but it was unsettlingly like what they used to call "magic." Her metabolism flickered every time she saw "ready for warp" appear on her relay.
It was a sunny afternoon the day Saraghina left Ugarte and the reach of Omni-Tek for good. They had been hunting game in Andromeda and had a picnic lunch in the shade of the ICC. Just before they were to return to Omni Prime Saraghina said she had to go to Newland City to get some more personal furnaces. Ugarte had this bad habit of knowing when Saraghina was lying, but since neither one of them was going to say anything Saraghina walked through the "NEWLAND" whompa to the next stage of her life without a second's worth of regret and tried not to think about how long Ugarte's pride would keep her waiting there at the foot of the statue.
Saraghina never had to look Ugarte in the eye after that, and yet she wondered - what if she ever pulled Ugarte out of the clear black instead of her target? Could she face Ugarte? Would there even be anything to say or would Saraghina's jaw just get smashed by the back end of a submachine gun and that be the end of it?
It came through on her relay: "ready for warp."
Saraghina took a deep breath and looked to the night sky. She was never sure if she was actually trying to see the satellites she used, but thought it was good to show them some respect regardless. It was an astonishing leap of faith they took, her closest friends and sometimes people she barely knew. While they were in transit she was the only thing in the universe to them, a glittering thing, the lone beacon in otherwise featureless black space calling them from it, just as Saraghina imagined another beacon to her racing through the streets of Omni Prime.
Far below her in the valley the medusas solemnly paced among themselves. "Return to me," she said under her breath as her heart raced and she lifted her arms. Saraghina's teammate appeared at her side, unharmed.
