“I’m not,” said Hope, and pressed a button on her console.
The Valhalla ruptured, almost like it was in slow motion, starting with Engineering, the bright billowing fire extending along her superstructure. The following Ezeroc ship tried to course-correct but even the bugs had limits on the Gs they could pull, and the ship was turned into a piece of stray vapor in the blink of an eye.
The buffet of the explosion grabbed the Tyche and hurled her towards the planet, a spear thrown by warring gods. Towards the pit of hell below them. Right towards where they were needed. El used what control she had left to control the Tyche’s tumble, bring the ship into something approximating a steady fall, and looked at Hope. “Thanks,” she said. “That was … good thinking.”
“That was pure luck,” said Hope. “Let me go see if I can fix whatever broke so we don’t die.”
El snorted, then laughed, and Hope laughed, the release of being alive singing through them. They were alive, and they were flying with a goddess, and her luck wasn’t spent. Not yet.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
SHE STOOD IN the cavern of her new home, breathing hard inside the suit she still had to wear. Her Queen might remake the parts of her body that needed to breathe, if given time, and enough bodies to experiment on. There were — and she looked at the rocky ceiling, as if she could see through it — plenty of warm bodies up there in the—
Hard black.
—space between worlds to serve as resources. Further experiments, fuel for the Hive, so hungry for so long out here without more life to consume.
Her helmet blinked a warning at her, human text saying CREW FATALITY EMERGENCY and a set of numbers and charts that all said no life remains. No brain activity, no pulse, no respiration. Even at the last, this captain was causing harm; he could at least have been fuel for the Hive. But he’d thought to come here — for what purpose, she still didn’t know, his mind dark to her. He’d put his steel against hers, and while his steel was strong, his training wasn’t.
He lost his good hand fighting for a better world. You killed him you killed him you killed him.
A keening sound came from her throat — her throat, her mouth. She clamped her lips shut, not knowing what it meant. She felt a sickness in her stomach as she looked down at the dead captain. She was sure she wasn’t ill.
She shook her head. This voice inside her head wouldn’t be quiet. She wanted to scratch at the seam in her skull, and as she raised her arm, gloved hand hitting her helmet, she felt that her arm was … sore. Not painful, as it would be if this man had scored a hit against her. He could have come at her with five men and still not mark her. Only one on his crew—
October Kohl.
—was of the right caliber. And he was coming. Drones out in the vast sands had encountered him and died. He was coming this way, and she needed to prepare. She knew Kohl would see the captain, then he would try and kill her. She flicked her sword down and out, blood slicking from the blade, and felt that soreness in her arm again.
Her eyes looked at the captain, his body slumped backward in death, just spoiled meat now. The rent where her sword had passed through his body vented air and blood out the front and back, spilling precious moisture on the cracked stone ground. She looked at his fallen sword on one side, the black blade something they would need to study — her kin were not good with machines like the humans were, but they had humans aplenty above the world who could be made to serve. She looked to the other side at a small device that had fallen to the ground.
She stepped closer. It wasn’t a blaster — after he’d fired at her, he’d re-holstered that. He didn’t want to hurt her, and that was the advantage she’d used to kill him. It wasn’t a weapon of any kind she could tell, not a laser, maser, kinetic weapon, or — the favored type their kind used — plasma blaster. She crouched down, pushing the threat of the approaching October Kohl from her mind, because here was a puzzle she needed to understand.
It was a small device, the kind that could fit in the hand and not be noticed in the heat of battle. It had a glass reservoir — half full — and a trigger.
It is a hypo.
She turned her head, almost in awe, to look at her arm. Where it was sore. She saw the merest wisp of venting air from a hole punctured clean through the material of her suit. The entry point of a hypo, pressed against her arm as she pressed her sword through this man’s heart.
It’s okay, Grace. It’ll be okay.
She took a step back, putting a hand over the tiny hole. Not because the air she was losing was of great concern but because she didn’t know what he had injected her with.
It’ll be okay.
“Okay for who?” she said. “What have you done to us?”
The body didn’t answer. The captain was dead.
She felt a slow burn in her blood, a trickle of promised pain. She coughed once, twice, and then curled over as the wave of agony hit her. The Hive cut her off in an instant, shutting down that source of unbearable pain, just her and her companion, nestled against the meat of her human brain. She screamed at the feeling of her blood being made of fire, of pure boiling acid inside her skull.
She dropped her sword, falling to her knees. She threw up, bile splattering the inside of her helmet, and then she screamed again, fingers clawing at the air. She reached out with her mind, trying to find the source of the pain. The rock of the ceiling cracked as she lashed out, and the stones closest to her buckled into fragments.
The pain didn’t stop. Her head was on fire. Her fingers tried to release the collar of her suit, to get the helmet off, so she could claw at her skull, to get the fire out. Her fingers clenched, and spasmed, unable to find a purchase on her helmet. She couldn’t get out. She couldn’t get free.
She, the first of her kind, would die here in this cave next to the captain. The thing inside her skull was in agony, its pain feeding hers, and hers feeding it.
Her helmet cracked against the ground, a spider’s web of fissures appearing over the glass. Yes. Smash it open. She raised her head, trying to bring it against the stony ground with enough force to fracture the glass. Crack. More lines against the glass. Crack. Another jagged seam across her vision. One more should do it. One more blow against the ground, and she would be free. She gathered her strength against the pain.
Strong hands found her, hauling her away from the ground, and she looked up into the face of October Kohl. He would stop her freeing herself. He would kill her. She screamed at him, gathering strength for one final lash with the blade of mind. Then she doubled over again as Kohl hit her in the stomach, her weak body folding around his fist, and she sank to the ground next to his feet.
“There’ll be none of that, Gracie,” he said. “It’ll be all right.”
For who? For who will be all right?
No one answered as the fingers of unconsciousness grabbed her, dragging her under.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
WHEN KOHL HAD trudged across the sand, he’d expected to find more fucking bugs. It was the place for it, right? Bugs, under the sand. Bugs, running towards him like cattle, the grains under his armored boots shifting as they thundered closer. He wanted it. He welcomed it.
It didn’t happen.
Ahead, he saw a cave opening. Of course the bugs had another cave. They liked dark places where the light of the sun couldn’t find ‘em. And fair enough, too: they were the kind of thing that scuttled under rocks. It just so happened — and Kohl patted his plasma cannon — that he had brought a match to take into the darkness.
A match, and about a million liters of kerosene. The analogy strained as he tried to make it work, because he didn’t have kerosene, so he gave up. The analogy wasn’t important; killing bugs was important. Which was problematic, because there weren’t any bugs. Not up here, anyway, but two sets of footsteps went into the mouth of that cave, which meant Gracie was in there and the cap had followed her. Two birds, one stone.
His HUD had updated with their vitals as
he’d approached, Gracie’s a dead calm, Nate’s up and down like an old-fashioned roller coaster. He figured that meant something, maybe the cap being tortured by bugs, but it didn’t matter. October Kohl was on the case, and soon enough he’d fix it all. He had his tape.
When the cap’s vitals flatlined, it caused him to pause his march towards the tunnel. Nate was a capable fighter, make no mistake, and Kohl had always wondered how badly he’d be hurt if he and Nate had come to blows. Not that Nate would win — the guy was a cripple, for fuck’s sake — but Kohl was sure that if Nate went down, he’d take a couple of Kohl souvenirs with him. It’d hurt, and probably hurt for a long time. It was good he and Nate had never found out how that would end.
It was bad that the reason they never had to find out was that Nate was dead.
He started into a run, about the best the armor could manage on the sand, but he grab-assed a little more speed when the sand gave way to rock as he entered the dark of the cave. What he saw was this: Nate was down like a cold beer on a hot day. There was blood and air escaping from his suit (not why he brought the tape, but it looked like it’d serve a couple purposes today). Gracie was on the ground, thrashing around and making all kinds of horrible noises. Kohl took in the discarded hypo, and did the math: Nate had shot Gracie up with a dose of nanites, Gracie had killed Nate because she had insects in her brain (which was good, in a way, because if she’d killed Nate, Kohl might have had to do something about that), and now Gracie was going through a horrible pain as the insects inside her were consumed by a bunch of tiny killer robots.
That last part was ace, but the pain part was less so.
Kohl got alarmed as she smashed her helmet against the ground, so he hurried on over, hauling her upright. He wanted to say to her I know what it feels like, but that wouldn’t have been helpful at all. He wanted to slap some silly out of her, especially as he saw her eyes narrow like she wanted to kill him. What worked for October Kohl in situations like this was percussive maintenance — didn’t matter none if you were talking machines or people, so he wound back a fist and punched her in the gut. The gut was a good choice because a) her helmet was already busted all to hell and b) it’d distract her without killing her. He gave her a shake to make sure she was alive. “There’ll be none of that, Gracie,” he said. “It’ll be all right.” There. That’s enough talking.
She passed out.
Fuckitall. This was way outside his position description. His job was to pick up things too heavy for most people and put them down in an alternative location, and he was fine with that. But no one seemed to be thinking about the end state of all of this. The end state was that, even if they got Gracie, she’d be wearing a suit, and wouldn’t have a bracelet on, and would therefor succumb to the external forces of evil alien mind bugs. Kohl sighed, then got to work.
There were two good swords on the ground, one shiny and bright, the other black as night. Both seemed to have a good enough edge, but the black sword was the one he needed, so he picked it up, armor clanking as he moved around the chamber. There was a skittering, and an Ezeroc drone appeared from deeper in the tunnel. “Finally,” said Kohl. He dropped the black sword, swung the plasma cannon around, and turned the bug into a blazing pyre of chitin with a five-second salvo. It promised more bugs, which gave Kohl a deep-seated happiness. There would be plenty of bug-killing in his future.
That job done, he once again picked up the black blade, sliding it through the material of Gracie’s suit’s right arm, just above the wrist. Difficult to do a tidy job in conditions like this, but he figured he wouldn’t be graded on perfection; it just needed to be good enough for government work. The blade slid through the material like there wasn’t any resistance — damn nice sword, maybe I can get Nate to sell it to me — then popped off the glove in a gout of escaping air. He clamped a hand around Gracie’s wrist, then fumbled out the roll of tape.
This is why he’d brought the tape. Only October Kohl was thinking.
He wound the tape around Gracie’s wrist and suit, creating a rough approximation of a seal. It wouldn’t hold in all the air, but it’d hold in enough air for him to do a better job. Next part, sword. He took the hilt of the black blade, pressing it into her bare hand. Then he wound more tape around her fist, securing it in place. Mind bugs? No problem.
He swiveled in place, checking Nate out. First things first, those holes. He bent over, slapping tape on the back of Nate’s suit, then rolling him over and repeating the process for the front. He stood up, surveying his handiwork.
Her voice, when it came, was a whisper. “What have I done?”
Kohl grinned, turning around. “Gracie. You okay?”
“No,” she said. “No. No. I’m not … what have I done?”
“Well now,” said Kohl, “I figure it’s a bit of a list, but I suspect first up in your mind is that you killed the cap.”
“I … couldn’t have,” she said. “I did.”
“Yeah, those mind fucker’s do that,” said Kohl. He tapped the side of his helmet. “I remember. You helped me then, Gracie, so I’m here to help you.”
He saw her look at the black blade taped to her hand, the tears running down her face, mixed with blood streaming from her nose, and right there was the thing he was hoping wouldn’t happen, but did. Sometimes in the shock and awe of a particular situation a person would go all to pieces, and they’d try and do some damn fool thing like kill themselves. Gracie took that sword, moving like she would cut on her other arm, so Kohl stepped forward, armored hand closing around the blade. “It’ll be okay, Gracie.”
“IT’S FAR FROM FUCKING OKAY!” she screamed at him. “I killed the man I love.”
“Yeah,” said Kohl, “but wouldn’t you prefer a little revenge?”
“Even they can’t fix this,” said Gracie, not listening to him at all, which was annoying but understandable in the circumstances.
“Well, see now,” said Kohl, “that’s not important.”
“It is,” she said. “Don’t you see? Nate, is, I…”
“Yeah,” said Kohl. He bent down to pick up the hypo. “They can’t fix this, but maybe we can.” He bent over, and pressed the hypo against Nate’s arm. What had El said about the nanites? Some damn thing like, They can rebuild freshly-injured tissue. To Kohl’s eye, and he’d had plenty of practice injuring people, the hole in Nate’s chest looked fresh. All of this was a gamble: ancient tech harvested from a space station run by devils, brought back online by a young Engineer high on too many stims. Eh, you’ve played worse odds, Kohl.
He squeezed the trigger, the hiss delivering the remaining contents of the canister into the cap’s body. “Now we need a jumpstart.” He flipped Nate over, finding the emergency med controls on the suit. They had the usual controls — a button for adrenaline, a button for a defib, a button for God’s own antihistamine, and so on. Kohl just needed to get Nate’s heart beating for a spell so the nanites could get to where they needed to be. He looked at the list of controls, said, “Fuck it,” and pressed all the buttons.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
KARKOSKI HAD HEARD people say things before like, it was as if a cloud lifted from my thoughts. She’d assumed it was worthless hyperbole, people trying to explain a flight of fancy away. People often wanted to make things they’d done someone else’s fault, or at least not their fault.
This time, Karkoski knew what they felt like.
Not just the cloud-thoughts part; that was self-evident. There had been a massive, ugly thing pressing on the top of her mind, squashing the real her out the sides. She’d seen a cider press when she was a child visiting a faux farm on some damn family holiday or another. The ‘farmers’ had filled the press with apples, pressed a few buttons, and the whole creaking wooden contraption had crunched those apples down. Pro job. Karkoski had tasted the juice — sweet, and fresh — and at that point decided that she never wanted to be a farmer. Too little impact on the world. She didn’t want to make juice. She hadn’t realized
that other people, or things, did, and that there was a terrible, horrible alien intelligence that made juice from people’s minds. Because being under Ezeroc control was like that: they pressed down with a strength that a single apple, let alone a hundred apples, couldn’t fight. And they licked at the juice that flowed out.
That presence was gone. There’d been a flash of amazing, startling pain, a feeling like Karkoski’s blood was on fire, and she’d screamed, clawing at her flesh. She’d cut her own skin with her fingernails. It was just feedback on the network, she was sure of it, and it meant that someone connected right into Hive HQ had been in a great deal of pain. Who, or what? Not important. The important part was that the apples in the press, so to speak, had a moment of freedom.
The bit that Karkoski understood very, very well now was how you didn’t want to be responsible for your actions.
She took in the holo stage, red everywhere as the Torrington fought a battle with the Republic fleet they’d come in with. Ships vented atmosphere and fire and people into the hard black, jousting with weapons powered by their nuclear forges. The milieu took place above a dead world surrounded by more dead ships. They’d come here following Chevell’s trail, the plan coming out as expected. First, apply pressure. Second, show the rest of the Republic what their Emperor was made of. You couldn’t just whip an Emperor out of a hat; the people who would end up serving under that banner needed to see what cloth his sails were cut from. But people in general, and Emperors in particular, well, they were stupid. So Karkoski and Chad had planned to sail off after Chevell and save him from his own fool self.
They didn’t realize that Chevell had taken them into the remains of the last great war humanity had fought against the Ezeroc. A war that no one alive even knew had been fought: all the people doing the fighting had died around an alien crust. The Emperor would have known, but again — dead. Humans had failed here. And Karkoski, who remembered giving the orders to open fire on her own ships, knew why they had failed. The insects didn’t need to lift a finger. They made you do what they wanted.
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