How had I ever believed that peace was possible?
“There’s some kind of access tunnel up here, chiliarch!” came one of the soldiers’ voices over the comm. “The door’s small. Got some kind of wheel-lock. If I’m reading the map right, looks like it goes through to the hold.”
Pallino and Siran both looked at me. “Just like you said,” Siran said.
I shrugged. “Even I get lucky sometimes.”
“Yeah! It’s an airlock! Won’t fit more than five or six at a time.”
“Very good,” I said in answer, checking the man’s location on the map. “Everyone, up to the third level! Move it!” A thought occurred to me and I grabbed the Irchtani captain by his feathered shoulder. “Udax, if we’re right . . . there’s no air out there.” The bird did not seem to understand. I thought I heard it click its beak through the suit mask. “Will you and your men be able to breathe?”
The Irchtani centurion shrugged my hand away. “Little air at home in sky,” it said. “Vacuum no problem.” It tapped its mask with a claw. “Have air. Rest no problem.” Then it shouldered its plasma rifle on its strap and hurried on. I caught Pallino watching me and sensed that the fellow was raising his eyebrows. Though he could not see my face either, I raised mine, and got the sense that he’d understood.
The door was what I’d expected: a pill-shaped hatch with a strangely human-looking wheel-lock in the center. The men had opened it, revealing a small, round-chambered airlock with an identical door on the far side and a single lever on the wall coated in phosphorescent paint. Cielcin space suits hung in niches on the wall just outside the first door, their faceless visors watching us, their too-long arms hanging limp.
“Tenner’s gone through already,” said one of the men as we approached.
“It’s a hold, all right,” came another voice on the comm—presumably that of the soldier, Tenner. “Dark as all hell, though.”
Pallino interrupted, “Any sign of the ships, man?”
“Not just here, but this place is massive. Must go on for miles.”
“We need to get on through,” I said. “At the very least, we’ll have a straight shot to the rear. We can join Cade’s men shutting down their warp cores.”
That was precisely what we did. I stood by in the hall while we began cycling our men through the airlock in groups of five. As I’d hoped, the entire system was mechanical, with the single lever filling or emptying the airlock by turns. Pallino went first, joining his man Tenner on the far side. Five men passed through, then ten. Fifteen. We were sixty.
We were wasting too much time.
“Valka.” I keyed over to our private line. “What’s your position?”
Her voice was an unspeakable relief in that dark place. “Nearly in orbit around the enemy ship,” she said. “What’s going on in there?”
“They ambushed us,” I said, “but we’re fine. Took a few losses, but I think we’re nearing their central hold.” My voice came out brittle, strangely hollow as I added, “We found the missing men. Or . . . we found one of them. They’re definitely here.”
Her answer—when it came—was a single, small word. “Dead?”
“Half-eaten.”
She swore in her native Panthai. “Anaryoch.”
Barbarians. For once, I agreed with her. It was strange hearing her apply that same curse to the Cielcin—the one she so often applied to me. I tried not to dwell on it.
Clang.
Something hollow and metallic rang in the darkness, and with several of the others I raised my torch to illuminate the hall. Was there something there? But it was only one of our scouts returning. Nearly half our number had gone through the airlock and were waiting on the far side, but I’d left men posted at the end of the hall and on the terrace overlooking the alien square. They were pulling back, moving with clockwork precision to the orders of their decurions.
“That’s all the birdos through,” came the voice of one of the more junior officers at my side. “Lord Marlowe, you’re next.” He raised a hand to usher me through.
I put a hand on the man’s arm. “I’ll wait ’til the last. Call the scouts back.”
The man broke off to do as he was told. “One-two, one-seven: pull back to the airlock. Repeat: pull back to the airlock. That goes double for you, oh-six.” I heard words of assent crackle over the line. Two voices. “Oh-six? Oh-six, do you copy?”
Silence.
Clang.
Somewhere on the levels below we heard the faint bump and grind of metal on stone. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
“The hell was that?” the junior officer asked.
Valka’s voice sounded in my ear. “What’s going on?”
I didn’t answer her.
“Send more of the men through,” I said. “Now.” Something had happened to oh-six, that much was clear.
Clang. Clang-clang.
“There’s something out there,” the junior man said.
“Form a line!” I said. “Cross the hall!” As I spoke the inner door of the airlock slammed shut and I just barely heard the whoosh of air as the men inside pulled the lever. At least the thing cycled quickly. There were perhaps twenty of us left on the inside by then. Perhaps less. I tapped my sword hilt anxiously against my thigh. To the junior man, I said, “Take two and stand at the end of the hall. I want eyes out there.” The hall was not long. Fifty feet perhaps to the far end and the terrace overlooking the square. If anything was to come at us down the hall they’d be up against our guns, but we were pinned against the airlock, bottlenecked by it.
The men hurried to obey, footsteps rebounding off steel and naked stone.
Clang-clang. Clang.
A small voice whispered in my ear, and I said, “Those are footsteps.”
I was half right, as Fate would have it.
I have a clear vision still of that moment: the junior officer and his trias standing in the circular arch at the end of the hall, backlit by our suit lights, framed against the dark. I remember the pop of the airlock’s inner door behind me and the hushed jostling of men as they hurried to fill it. There were just over a dozen of us left, and but for their motions there was nothing to hear save the ragged winds that pulsed through the alien ship like breath through the alveolae of some impossibly giant lungs. Somewhere, distantly, a gentle stream of water fell as from a stalactite into a pool. It made me think of the caverns beneath the palace of the Undying, of Brethren, and of our necropolis. Of Calagah.
Then two arms descended from the ceiling, white and slender and too long even for one of the Cielcin. They seized the middle soldier and pulled him screaming up into the night. Plasma flashed violet in the blackness, splitting the gloom like a wedge. The other men screamed too and dropped to their knees, firing upward. The metal scraping sound squealed in the darkness, and I cut the volume on my headset as Pallino and Valka and several of the others began asking questions at once.
The screaming stopped, and distantly I heard a thud as of meat and metal wetly striking the floor, and guessed the junior man had fallen. Or been dropped.
“Open the door!” one of the others was shouting, hammering on the airlock door.
“It’s on the ceiling!”
One of the others screamed—and his scream choked off without warning. The line went dead. Plasma flashed again, and between the whine of gunshots I heard a faint scuttling and once more the scrape of metal on stone. Then something huge and horrible fell from the darkness above. Bone-white and hulking, taller than any man and far broader it was, with hunched shoulders and a head lost to shadow. I could hardly get a glimpse of it in the sparse light, though where the light caught it shone with a fire like the light of stars.
For a brief instant, I saw the last of the three soldiers find his feet and bring his plasma rifle to bear. He stood etched against the shadow and his q
uarry, a pitiful small thing against the Dark and the monster that had emerged from it. His rifle flashed, and for a moment then I beheld the beast clearly. Nearly twice again so tall as a man and armored all in white, its legs bent like a dog’s, its arms—and there were four of them—so long they nearly trailed the ground. And its face! Its face! It wore a horned mask with a hooked visor like the beak of some evil bird, and beneath I saw the silver-glass flash of teeth and knew it had been Cielcin once.
One of those impossible metal arms caught the soldier by the ankle and pulled. He tumbled backward and struck the floor.
“Fire!” I shouted.
But the demon was gone, dragging that last hapless soldier into the night.
Hands were pulling me back, forcing me over the threshold and into the airlock. “You have to go now, lord!” one of the soldiers said.
“We won’t all fit!” said another. “Breda! Take Marlowe and the others and go!” He was one of the decurions. There was a chipped double stripe across the right side of his faceless visor, right below where the eye should be.
The man, Breda, asked, “What about you?”
The decurion checked his rifle. “To the job, man.” And he turned, and four of the others with him. The metallic clanging came once again from the end of the hall, but even by our torchlight I could see nothing. But it was coming. We knew it was coming.
I have grown tired of watching men die.
“Follow us as quickly as you can!” I said.
“Aye, lord!”
Clang.
An awful sound went up, like the high keening of the Cielcin but higher and far louder, undercut by a metallic whine like the noise of turbines spinning up. I heard an awful crash and for an instant I had one final vision of the monster as it lurched into the hall, pulling itself along the passage as though it climbed up a shaft, using the ribbed arches for handholds to keep its too-tall body parallel to the floor.
Someone slammed the airlock and pulled the lever. Air roared out, and I could hear the sounds of shouting over the comm and—through the bulkhead and the vibrations in my feet—I felt the shock of gunfire.
Then nothing.
“It won’t fit through here,” one of the others said.
The airlock door dented inward, struck by one of the beast’s mighty fists. Each of us jumped, and an instant later the rear door opened onto the vessel’s central hold.
“Out!” I said, “Out now! Fuse the outer hatch!”
“It’ll let the air out!” one of the others said, staggering out after me.
“It doesn’t need air!” I snarled.
When the last of us was over the threshold, two of the men turned and—using their rifles—welded the outer door of the airlock shut. I could still feel the drumming, hammering of the alien fists against the inner door. Surely it could have turned the wheel? Or was it only angry that we had gone where it could not follow?
The hammering stopped.
“What happened, Had?” asked Pallino, pushing his way through the ranks toward me.
“What the hell was that?” asked one of the others.
My mind was still with the decurion and the others who had stayed behind to cover our escape. It took Valka to shake me loose, her voice in my ear. “Hadrian.” She repeated the other man’s question, “What happened? What was that?”
“That,” I cleared my throat and—answering both her and the others—said, “was one of the demons of Arae.”
CHAPTER 24
BEYOND THE DOORS OF THE DARK
“DO YOU THINK THEY made it out?”
“Hope they stuck the bastard good and clean.”
“Did you see its fangs?”
“Keep moving,” Pallino said, waving our men down the line.
The space about us was so vast I could not see the ceiling or the far wall. Darkness deeper than the void’s endless day filled the hold, and the faint red sconces that lined the wall shone so faintly to our human eyes that they might have been mere candle flames. And the quiet . . . there was no air in that vast hold, and so that space—which should have echoed with the sound of feet and shouting—was silent as a funeral, save for the muddy reverberations that rose up through our bones.
A great chasm lay open at our right side, thousands of feet deep. Catwalks and bridges vanished across it, and stairs rose and descended alongside rough cage-lifts and mighty chains. By our torchlight I beheld more catwalks rising in the night, not straight but twisted like the minds of the creatures that built them.
The mapping drones hadn’t pierced this far into the vessel, and so all we had to go by was a muddy sonar scan that depicted a blurry, empty space a dozen miles long or more. The sounds of fighting came over the comm. I only caught one word in seven through the radio hiss.
“Pinned down in sector C7!”
“Enemy presence near the starboard engine cluster!”
“They’re coming through the walls!”
“Do you think there are more of that thing?” Siran asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, lingering a moment to allow the Irchtani to catch up. They could not fly where there was no air, and their short legs did not bend easily. They hopped along like grounded birds in our wake, swords and firearms clasped in scaled hands. “But we should be prepared.”
Siran bobbed her head in short agreement. “Pal’s got the word out to the centurions. They know it’s out there.”
“Good,” I said. The last thing we needed was one of the other groups blindsided by a similar ambush. “I suppose we should be grateful it came for us first.” No sooner had the words escaped me than another, darker thought occurred. But why did it come for us out of all our battle groups? Because we were deepest into the Cielcin vessel? Or because we were near to something precious?
Or worse: had it come for me, personally?
I felt the weight of Siran’s eyes on me. She alone had stood with me on Arae, she alone had seen one of these Pale beasts before. I opened my mouth to respond, but before I could a voice crackled over the officers’ channel, drawn and thin. “We’ve located the fuel reservoirs. We’re going in.” It was Cade, one of Pallino’s other centurions.
“Good!” Pallino answered. “Lock it down, man. Earth guard you.”
“And you.”
I remembered the fate of the Androzani, or of Prince Ulurani’s vessel. We might do the same here. More importantly, we might prevent the Cielcin from detonating their own ship if they had a mind.
The grim thought was pushed out of my mind a moment later, for one of the scouts Pallino had run ahead called back over the line, “Sir! I’ve got something up ahead.”
“What is it?” I demanded.
Recognizing my palatine accent over the line, the man swallowed audibly. “A ship, my lord. One of ours.”
I’d pressed forward through the others and so came to the place where the scout stood by the rail, torch beams pointed up along a rickety stair toward a shape hanging in the night. The hard edges and geometric lines were as alien in that alien place of ribbed arches and organic curves as Tanaran had been on the bridge of the Mistral so long ago. But there it was. The blackened hull of an Imperial starship yawned out of the night above us.
“Find a way up!” I gave the order. “Quickly now! Double time!” We had to know, had to be certain these were the lost ships and that the men aboard were truly dead.
Valka’s voice crackled in my ear. “Did you find them?” she asked.
I watched our scouts hurry up the steps in groups of three, answered, “We found a ship. Not sure if it’s one of the missing ones or some other. We’ll know soon.”
“We’ll be in orbit soon.”
“Shields are holding?”
“They are.”
“Tell Aristedes to concentrate fire on the forward section. We should be safe here and it may distr
act them.” There was nothing on the other line a moment, and I said, “Valka?”
She answered almost at once, “He heard you.”
“Lord Marlowe!” The voice of one of the legionnaires cut over whatever else Valka might have said. “We found a hatch.”
* * *
The airlock had been forced long ago. Deep scratches ran along the edges of the doorway, as if some mighty beast had carved the door from the hull with impossibly strong fingers. The inner door was the same. All was dark within, save where the emergency lighting strips glowed near the floor like the last embers of a dying fire. I ran my fingers over the plaque welded along the inside of the bulkhead, feeling the letters raised there.
ISV Merciless.
The Merciless. She’d been shown no mercy, in the end. That much was certain. The deckplates in the hall beyond were scuffed and scraped-over, a sure sign that someone or something had dragged heavy equipment through.
“We found them,” I said to everyone and no one. I could hardly believe it. I had expected to return to Forum with nothing.
Valka’s bright voice slashed into me. “We’ve not found them yet.”
Her words pushed me over the threshold into the darkened ship. She was right. We had to know, had to be certain the men had not all found themselves on some other communal dining slab. The overhead lights flickered on, responding to our presence. Loose wires hung from a place in the ceiling ahead, casting their hangman’s shadows along the corridor walls.
“Pallino, secure the bridge,” I said, stepping round the wires. “And send a team to the engine room. I want to know if she’s still spaceworthy. Udax, have your men secure the hull. I don’t want any surprises.”
“Sir?” Udax tilted his head, inquiring.
“We’ll need to fly her out of here sooner or later,” I said, and pushed past the feathered auxiliary toward the maw of an access corridor that ran deeper into the captured ship. Much of my adult life I’d spent aboard Imperial battleships. I knew the shape of them, and though I’d never been aboard the Merciless before, nor any ship of her class, I knew the way, down five levels and forward to the place beneath the bridge where the ship’s cargo—its complement of soldiers—slept their sleep of the dead.
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