I felt her regret at parting, we'd ridden in that old poddler for years, and its small consciousness knew we'd probably not be coming back. I released a jolt of sugar for it into Kara's blood, and felt the poddler's simple pleasure echo back through her. We clambered out through its abdominal pouch flap, suddenly clumsy on land and out of the warm body cavity, and let it go.
The maintenance crew were similarly untangling from the sharchangel skin beast, all fins and claws and hands and strength. I gestured an acknowledgement to them as Kara and I slithered over the lubricated floor and plunged into the frothing tank, though with rudimentary senses like ours, they probably didn't notice. As we crawled inside the great sea creature I knew they'd take care of our poddler until either we returned from our Paleozoic battle, or we failed and the world ceased to exist.
As a gastroid, my connections to the skin beast were relatively simple, and I felt the shock of the sharchangel's senses even before Kara's fine lacework of blood vessels fully linked her, and hence me, to the huge predator. Its senses were the best our military bio-science could produce, visible light, infrared, electrical and tactile lateral line all smoothly integrated into a single three dimensional all-around picture of the world. Its brain couldn't possibly process that picture of course, but the point was that Kara and I could see it perfectly as our nervous systems knitted into the sharchangel's.
Now the maintenance crew in our poddler were completing their checks, odd to see another consciousness lighting up our mount of so many years, and odd now to have no others here as we prepared for the climactic event of the Time War. "Anticipation", this mission was to the very origin of the War, the fork in the long road for the first multi-celled animals, which could lead either to us or to the Exos.
But everything was already prepared. We three had completed our long training in both combat and bio-manipulation of the tiny creatures we fought over. The Time Corps had endlessly probed the past to find the critical point of the War, and determined that neither side could send more than one composite creature to the battle, for fear of destroying the delicate common ancestor of both timelines. And we'd said our goodbyes, I'd kissed our gastroid friends and Kara had exchanged secretions with the circulants we cared for. There was nothing more to do now, but dive into the ancient oceans and challenge our Exo counterpart to decide which history would be born.
So we launched into deep time, with no awareness beyond we three, intertwined in mind and body. There was the overwhelming muscular power of the sharchangel ready to fight to the death, but above all the shared awareness with Kara, "Love", my battle comrade, my heart, my complement and supplement, the one who supplied emotion and meaning to me. Without her I would still be a digestive system with a sophisticated brain, but my intellect would be logic without significance.
We approached the vital day, when destiny had turned on the tiniest actions of creatures that were each just a ball of a dozen cells. Each was a small bag of life with a hollow space inside to maximise the size of the colony, while still allowing every cell access to the outside environment. But the inside of the cell bag was a rich environment too, and inevitably smaller bags found their way inside larger bags to become intimate allies, the basis for all animal life.
In our world the descendents of the inside creatures, the gastroids and the circulants, had become intelligent, able to build civilisation on the engineering of a hundred varieties of skin beast. But in the Exo world it was the skins that became intelligent, relegating our analogues to internal slaves used merely as organs to serve the skins. That one uncertain event allowed both timelines to coexist until it was resolved to allow only one possibility.
So we had warred through all the neutral timelines that the Exos would deny us, until now, when we could finally engage them at the fulcrum, and eliminate the perversity of intelligent skins from all of history. This was the mission Kara and I had trained for all our lives, and for which the sharchangel had been bred to perfection.
"Excitement", Kara's battle readiness filled our blood, and the sharchangel came to peak alertness as we burst into the ancient water, warm on a shallow reef. Vast mats of algae still lay vulnerable in sheets under the wide sky, ready to feed the first explosive spread of the multi-celled animals "Hostility", but there no time to observe. The Exo champion was already waiting, a huge flat skin with bulges for its internal slaves, and arrays of hands and claws much like those of our sharchangel. The Exos had modified their own form for this mission, just as we had designed our ideal skin beast.
"Patience", we circled carefully, assessing the enemy and looking for weakness, "Fear", it charged with astonishing speed, and the two skins' claws ripped into each other. "Pain", for a moment I thought Kara was slashed, but no, it was the skin's pain she felt and rebroadcast in chemicals. Signals from the shared nerves faded and died as the sharchangel's body was raked and broken, the Exo's attack was too fast and too strong for us to counter from the inside, the sharchangel's own combat instincts would have to guide it.
"Anger", but the Exo was also wounded, in our now-clouding vision we could see gaping holes in it, through which the slaves' organs "Horror" were unravelling. We tried to hold back the sharchangel's attack, but it was berserk with pain and anger now, fighting with the tactics bred into our weapon skins for millenia: it aimed for the internal slaves because in our world they would be the real opponent.
"Weakness", and the Exo shared our folly, it was targetting our skin beast though Kara and I could be killed by a fraction of the damage the skin was suffering. But that damage was already too great, we could feel the skin beast dying around us, and then realised we were worse than defeated "Tragedy" because the battle was devastating the reef. We were destroying the ancestral animals, their road could no longer lead to either world, doom for both sides.
Now for the first time Kara and I fought directly, not against the enemy but against the dying skin that imprisoned us. Outside it we'd quickly die, but the instinct to escape could not be denied. As we lost vision "Pity" we could see the Exo's slaves, now clearly dead, still leaking into the dark water and we knew that it too would soon die.
There was no hope for the precious cell bags on the reef to endure in their original form, though a few might live, their history would be completely changed. Not even our enemy would survive to guide them into an Exo future, all animal life as it had existed in both timelines was lost. "Compassion", for a moment Kara's feeling made no meaning in my mind, then the idea formed, and filled me with disgust: she wanted to enter the Exo.
We knew of experiments with Exo prisoners, using them as skins for our people, proving our ancestry is biologically compatible, but it was psychologically impossible - the composites always went insane and had to be destroyed. "Hope", but there was nothing else to try, no chance but the ultimate desperation, and Kara could still generate enough hope for both of us.
We crawled through water clouded with the residue of battle, blind and deaf, guided by my gastroid taste sense to the wounded Exo, and then clambered over it "Terror" expecting to be skewered on its claws at any moment, until we found the opening where the slaves had been torn out. Entering that hole of death was the most difficult thing we ever did, and the last.
For the three joined and died that day, when I was born. The I that is the gastroid, and the circulant, and the Exo skin, the sum and blending of the sentients of two timelines, this is the I that lives on. This I cannot return to the remembered futures, which now have no histories to create them, but I have found my life's work, here in the ancient seas with the creatures twice my ancestors.
Here I practice the life engineering skills of my three pasts, I seal off the cell bags to symbionts of all sorts, I nurture the precious few that colonise their own internal spaces. This is the dream of the unified I, that cannot allow either timeline victory over the other: that each animal will be a single creature. Gut, circulation and exterior, all part of one being.
Without conflict, without slavery, with each creature isolated and in need of the companionship of others, there will be no Time War. Though I will not see the future that I create in my own image, I know it will be Golden.