by Rachel Caine
“We will die. Let me do what I must, what I was created to do.”
Okay, that sounded . . . creepy. Her voice was freaking me out too. But at least she was talking, right? I turned to the med bot. “What do you think?”
“At worst, Patient C-X murders you meatballs and dismantles me. My memory core is fully backed up. I say let’s roll the dice.”
I sighed. Why did I bother asking EMITU anything?
Finally, Chao-Xyll said, “I know it is difficult to trust us, Zara, but we know now what it is we are meant to do. Please . . . do not allow us to fail again.”
That touch of pathos swayed me. Before I could think better of it, I used my H2 to override the lockdown, and C-X exploded from the wrecked Medbay, racing in a terrifying insectoid skitter toward Ops.
I followed her as fast as I could.
When I caught up with C-X, I found her at the console. She was alone; Bea was eyeing her with equal measures of fear and wariness. Chao-Xyll ran her fingers over the screen so fast I couldn’t follow the motions, and then she seemed to be broadcasting, all channels, all frequencies. It was a blast of complex, unfathomable noise, overwhelming the translators that tried to cope with it; it hurt Nadim and the other Leviathan on an almost cellular level. Whatever it was, it wasn’t communication for us.
The translator kicked in several seconds later to tell us what the message meant.
“You serve a false king. The queen is risen. Behold the Empress of the Swarm! Follow me. Follow me now, kindred, and you shall feast as never before!”
FROM THE BRUQVISZ COLLECTION THE NEW STAR FOREST, CHIPPED AND REGISTERED EDITION, TRADED TO EARTH
. . . can be no doubt that the discovery of a new, intelligent, star-faring species is a cause for celebration among all who are privileged to travel the dark. And yet the history of Humankind is troubled. Many stories of terrible wars, of preying upon their own for pleasure and gain. This is baffling to most, even to the Bruqvisz.
Yet also the Bruqvisz share with Humankind a love of stories, and dancing, and so there must be siblinghood in that bond. We share many tales with the Humans in this new collection, and in return the Humans share many tales with us.
Surely this can only be the start of a new and rich collaboration.
Or war. Maybe war. But if so, we will tell your stories, Humans! We honor you with this promise of glorious fame, and possible glorious death.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Lost and Found
CHAO-XYLL, EMPRESS OF the Swarm.
There was an unmistakable power to her message, far more than the human translation the matrix managed. This was what compassion got us, and if he had been able to see it, Marko would have thought so too. If he could see how majestic she was, a beautiful insect queen, he’d make the same choice again. Try to save her. Try to protect me. Different sides of the same coin. And that was Marko, who’d never thought he was good enough—that he wasn’t a real Honor. But thanks to his sacrifice, C-X was battling Lifekiller for control of the Phage.
She was fighting, in part, for his survival too.
I couldn’t breathe, felt like, and then I realized that I was gasping but a headache was forming. Power systems were failing. Air was going bad in here, fast, and though the automatic scrubbers would keep us going for an hour or so, we’d be operating at lower and lower levels until we just stopped thinking altogether. Out of weapons, except for what we could do hand to hand. Nadim, unasked, had thrown himself into a tandem fight with Typhon, rolling, twisting, crushing the Phage crawling on his hull against the bigger ship’s armor, while Typhon’s fins and tail raked the invaders away. Incredibly, Typhon had enough power reserved for one more attack, and as he finished cleaning up Nadim’s Phage problem, he dived straight for Lifekiller.
He hit the god-king with a stunning, shattering force that staggered even something of that size and power, and then Typhon, nose still buried in Lifekiller’s flesh, released another sonic blast. His last, I thought; he’d held that in reserve, and it was the very last of his energy. Chao-Xyll’s noise was still screaming over the speakers, and I saw Yusuf and Starcurrent on the screens trying to talk, but I couldn’t hear them. Their lights went dark. Consoles went out.
Then ours did too.
I ran to the transparent wall, my only view of the battle now, and saw that Ophelia had launched a grappling mechanism and was trying to tow Typhon back. Lifekiller seemed momentarily stunned, and some of his limbs had been torn away. Those tentacles floated, twitching and freezing. Luna Colony’s defenses were down, guns silent.
Lifekiller roared—there was no other word for it; it was a deep, subsonic wave that hit us like a slap and sent Nadim tumbling. In the chaos Ophelia’s grapples broke loose, and she and Typhon spun in separate directions. Nadim leveled himself out and flipped head over tail to get back to the fight. He was hurting, bleeding, all but exhausted, but he wasn’t giving up.
“Time to leave the nest,” I said to Chao-Xyll. Her black-armored head turned, and there was almost nothing human about it now, except I could still see her features underneath the chitin, her eyes. “You can’t stay in here and do this.”
She set that command to the Phage on loop and skittered off, heading for the docking bay. Nadim?
She’s going. A pause. I felt a small pulse of relief. She’s gone, launched herself from the docking bay.
Without a ship. Out into space. Alone. The last time she tried this, the Phage nearly ate her.
But I watched from the window as her hybrid body hurled through space and headed for the Phage swarm.
It was like watching a black hole rip away the surface of a star. It started with a few of the Phage spiraling out from the main force and approaching her, and then more. Then a stream of them being irresistibly drawn away from Lifekiller’s massive presence to orbit Chao-Xyll in a thick, chitinous, living shell. Thousands. Tens of thousands.
Lifekiller, intent on breathing his poison over the Earth, didn’t notice the defection. Ophelia dove at him and hit him hard, rolled away but was caught in a net of flailing tendrils; she snapped free with a supreme effort, but I saw the slices they’d left on her, bleeding starlight. As long as he’s fighting us, he’s not killing people on Earth. The guns fired up again from the surface, and from Luna Colony, catching Lifekiller in the middle, but as before, they did little damage, if any. Quell came out of nowhere with another diving attack, and she too got trapped by Lifekiller’s lashing tentacles. Typhon, though nearly inert from the last sonic bolt, roused himself to motion, and used his sharp tail to slice her free.
The four Leviathan crowded into a tight, rotating, defensive circle. All of them were weary, wounded, bleeding; the Phage had withdrawn, but Lifekiller was invincible. They’d hurt him, but they hadn’t stopped him.
The blob ships were like jackals, constantly at the back of everything, and they were throwing everything they had at Lifekiller, changing focus from the Phage when Chao-Xyll joined the fray. But their weapons were bouncing off the god-king in ripples of energy too, silent shockwaves that took out a couple of Elaszi ships on the rebound. Killing was so easy for this monster, the one we’d woken up. Nadim’s pain spiked in my head as I framed that thought.
We’re losing.
It hit me with staggering force, and I wanted to scream, to cry, to throw myself out in a useless fight against an old, forgotten god. I struggled to think in the thickening air aboard Nadim. “Can the Abyin Dommas help us?” I asked Nadim. “Sing, like they did before?”
“Too far,” he responded tersely. “It will not work at such a distance.”
“Maybe like before, we can sing with Starcurrent—”
“Comms are down, Zara. We can’t.” Grim sorrow tinged his voice. The awareness that we were damn well beaten. That Earth was dying, and we were watching it happen.
That was the exact moment that the universe exploded around us with drones. Not from the planet below but coming from the darkness of space—zipping, flying like heroic darts to smash th
emselves against Lifekiller’s skin. It must have hurt; each one carried an explosive charge, and the swarm of drones lit him up like Christmas. I saw a sleek, pale ship glide through and deliver six fast, devastating blows from a percussion weapon—like rail guns, but more powerful than that.
Lifekiller howled that angry, subsonic rumble again, and I felt it doing things to Nadim. To all the Leviathan. It was hurting them, injuring them internally. Dammit. Quell slid into unconsciousness and floated away limp; Ophelia went with her to try to protect her from any additional attacks by Lifekiller, but he had loomed back over the Earth again. His shadow fell over a vast section of the planet, darkening the blue water, the green and brown lands. He was a stain on the universe.
He needed to die, but I didn’t know how the hell to accomplish that. The pale ship that glided through must have been the drone owner’s; it finished its attack run and zipped into an accelerated escape.
I knew who that was, even though our comms were down. Had to be Bacia. They’d survived the Sliver and come to exact a little revenge—but not at the cost of dying over it. Their drones slowed Lifekiller down, though, and the rail guns had injured him. Not enough to make him back off and retreat. And Bacia wasn’t taking another run at him. They were already gone, headed to some safe, presumably expensive haven far, far away.
But Bacia hadn’t come alone.
Suncross’s last stand had resonated across the Bruqvisz comm networks. Must have, because now more mech ships were appearing. One, then five. Then twenty more. It wasn’t exactly a fleet, and they weren’t exactly organized, but I could almost hear the bloody victory bellows from where I stood, gaping. They came at Lifekiller in a chaotic blur of motion, weaving in and out of formations and firing, firing, firing until Lifekiller finally turned away from Earth in a slow, lumbering motion and began grabbing for their ships. They slid away like quicksilver, darting through his tentacles like little fish and stabbing him over and over and over.
And then I heard Chao-Xyll. Her cry resonated through Nadim, like Lifekiller’s but different, a frequency that made my heart skip and my guts contract, something so primal and desperate and furious that I wanted to jump into space myself and do battle, small and soft and fragile as I was.
The Phage went mad.
They arrowed between the Bruqvisz ships, ignoring them completely, and swarmed Lifekiller.
The god-king, for all his power and poison, wasn’t prepared for that. Not for his own weapons, his own genetically engineered warriors, to start burrowing into his own armor, his own flesh and blood and bones. Lifekiller thrashed and smashed at the swarm, but it evaded him, intent on only one thing.
I instinctively understood what Chao-Xyll had commanded them to do. It was their basic, most primal instinct.
Eat.
And they feasted. They ripped beneath the god-king’s armor. They burrowed into his eyes, in his screaming mouth. They squirmed beneath plates and tore open wounds and they ate him.
It was the most horrifying and awe-inspiring thing I’d ever seen, and the Bruqvisz ships backed away, still firing, dealing lethal blows that severed Lifekiller’s limbs, left him vulnerable and helpless and spewing blood and poisons into the void.
He twitched. He pulsed. He crawled with Phage.
I saw Chao-Xyll hanging in space before Lifekiller, an insignificant speck beside his bulk, but radiating power and majesty as her swarm, hers, reduced a god to meat.
Bea was holding on to me, horror-stricken and victorious, and I put my arm around her. Together, with Nadim and the other Leviathan, we watched a god die.
Lifekiller’s last feeble twitches stopped, and he just . . . came apart. Pulled to edible pieces by his own slave-warriors, who consumed most of him, and left the rest spinning and freezing in the void.
I held my breath, because now we were in danger again. The Phage were never not hungry, never not angry. And we were so, so vulnerable.
But they went back to swirl in a tight spiral around Chao-Xyll, like a coat of armor with her at the center, and I don’t know how she managed it, but she accessed our comms. And it was Chao-Xing’s voice, as real and human as I remembered her. I felt tears burn in my eyes, and this time, I let them come. Let them fall in immense relief.
She said, “They belong to us now. We won’t let them harm anyone else. We will take them far from here, to a place where they can eat flaff and learn to be . . . peaceful. It will take time, but they will heed us if we supply their basic needs. In time, they will Awaken, as Xyll did. We will teach them how to be both One and Many. No one will be able to use them as Lifekiller did.”
“You’re leaving,” Nadim said softly. “I . . . can’t say that I am sorry to hear that. Your swarm terrifies me.”
“As it should,” she said. “It kills innocents and civilians, gods and monsters alike. It is the most destructive force in the universe. And we must find a place for our children to learn better. We will miss you, Nadim.”
“I never imagined you as the empress of an alien race,” I said.
“This is the path we chose. We regret nothing, and we thank you, Zara, for allowing us to evolve. Please save Marko, and tell him we never meant to hurt him. And as for Typhon—”
Typhon finally emerged from his protective walls, a heavy presence weighted with grief, pain, and so much weariness. But he was talking, and that mattered. “You are not my Chao-Xing,” he said. It was the clearest his voice had ever been. “But I honor your sacrifice. And I thank you for what you have done. We could not do it alone.”
“If you hadn’t weakened him, we couldn’t have either,” she said. “All of you mattered in this fight. All of us. And we will miss you, grim old friend. We could never offer the bond you needed, but Yusuf can. And Starcurrent. I hope you will accept them and permit them to help you heal.”
He grunted. I supposed that was as much approval as he was ever going to give. Nadim was so quiet that I couldn’t even tell what he was thinking. Likewise, Yusuf and Starcurrent must be listening—if Typhon was letting them—but they weren’t saying a word inside the link, just a general sense of unease. Ghostwalk was staring at all of us, outside the connection, and I thought he looked sad.
“Zara.” She had one last thing to say, and it was to me.
“What?”
“We feel . . . grateful that you tried to view us as a being of worth, no matter what.”
“Before or after the . . . merger?”
“Both. You tried to accept that Xyll might not be a monster, despite evidence to the contrary. You tried to believe that your friend could be saved when others would have given up. Taken the easy path.”
I quirked a wry smile. “I’m pretty well known for picking the hard road every time.”
“Those decisions brought you here, and you belong where you are. And we are proud of you. Beatriz, you as well. We won’t forget you or what you have taught us—that there is strength in kindness and mercy also.”
“Thanks,” Bea said. “And . . . take care.”
Yusuf added, “I didn’t know you well or for that long, but I’m aware of what you’ve done for every single one of us. I won’t forget either.”
“I will sing of you,” said Starcurrent.
Finally Nadim broke his silence. “I can’t lie. I don’t like what you’ve become, but one day I’ll learn not to fear and hate the Phage. I promise. We’ll meet again.”
“We understand, little one.” How funny to hear C-X calling Nadim that, but she had a different sense of the universe now, through her connection to the hive mind. “We don’t know how long it will take to teach our young or how long we will live in this form. But we will always remember. And so will our children.”
I wasn’t sure I liked the Phage remembering me, but I felt a pulse of real affection. Even if she was the Empress of the Swarm now, she would always be my friend. “Good-bye, C-X,” I said. “I think I kind of love you.”
“Same,” she said.
And then the giant, ar
mored ball of the Phage began to move. It picked up speed, rolling, reflecting the distant light of the sun like a glistening, tumbling, terrifying jewel.
Then it was gone, swimming with incredible velocity to somewhere I hoped we’d never have to visit. Because I knew one thing for damn sure: I never wanted to fight Empress Zhang Chao-Xyll. Her absence felt like a hole in my world, but it also seemed like a damned miracle that I was still breathing.
Nadim was starting to get a trickle of energy back from Earth’s warm, yellow sun; it wasn’t quite his frequency but close enough to start recharging him. The air freshened a little, and I realized I was exhausted, aching, soaked with sweat.
And alive.
We were all alive.
It started as a tickle at the back of my throat, then burst out in a laugh, half-crazy and uncontrolled, and then I raised my voice and let out a yell that did Suncross proud. I grabbed Beatriz and danced her around, and then Ghostwalk was booming his own victory cry and dancing with us, and hell, even EMITU was chanting a victory haiku as he wheeled around waving extensors.
I could sense Yusuf and Starcurrent celebrating. Jon Anderson too, in his decidedly grim fashion.
The Bruqvisz contacted us as our comms flickered back to life, and we all shouted together, danced, screamed out defiance and victory and the death of Lifekiller.
Of course, the first one on my screen was a damn blob. “We have salvage rights to all Phage remains and everything we can mine from the god-king, yes?”
“If I say yes, that means you don’t mess with me?”
“You are allied with the Empress of the Swarm. It’s bad business to start fights we cannot win.”
Right, like C-X would come kill some blobs for me when she was wrangling so many Phage already. But what these blobs didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. “Right, you do not want to piss me off. My word is good, though. A deal’s a deal, so grab whatever you can get. It’s yours for the taking!”
I figured Earth had way more important things to worry about, and maybe they’d even appreciate the blobs cleaning up the space garbage. Part of me did worry about the Elaszi running off with bits of Lifekiller, but they seemed like the type to sell the most valuable chemicals and discard the rest, not clone him to start a second galactic war. To paraphrase the blobs, carnage was bad for business.