The table crashed to the ground with a titanic thud that shook the floor, splintering and shattering into a cloud of wood and stone and dust.
The fonias continued to scrabble for her neck, despite the blood pouring from its own slit throat. She shoved it away, inadvertently throwing it against the knives of the one behind it. A burst of gunfire ripped through both of them.
Victoria stood. The last two gigas towered over the body of the sophont, standing where the massive table had been moments before. Pallasophia knelt behind her, bracing Victoria's rifle on her knee. Photeos was out of sight, as was Stavros. Eleni was running toward the massive table. Numerous mastigas legs and arms stuck out from underneath it, pinned between its titanic weight and Victoria's own pod.
A hail of bullets from the shadows told her where the missing soldiers likely were. Only a few of the bullets hit their targets, but it was enough to distract the two remaining gigas. Behind her, Pallasophia emptied the rest of the rifle's magazine into the two giants.
Against multiple sources of gunfire, the first gigas went down quickly. Victoria caught sight of Stavros as he limped into view. He held his rifle loosely, somewhere between his shoulder and hip in a stance that looked like an attempt at proper form done with arms that simply could not stand up to the weight anymore.
More shots came from Victoria's left as Eleni returned her attention to the mastigas and unloaded an entire clip in inaccurate, if devastating, automatic fire.
Victoria, now lacking a ranged weapon of her own, watched as speckles of red appeared on the wall behind the last gigas. It turned, sheltering his face from the incoming torrent of bullets long enough to pick up a chair and hurl it in Victoria's general direction. She threw herself sideways and the heavy metal chair missed her almost entirely. Despite the attempt at dodging, it slammed into her ankle, hard. The impact threw that leg backward and turned her evasion into a sloppy fall.
Victoria rolled, came upright, and then immediately went down again as her ankle refused to support her weight. Rather than fight it, she tucked that leg under her hips and went down again. As the gigas fell, she came back to her feet, avoiding putting weight on that leg as much as she could.
Eerie, terrifying quiet fell as gun after gun went silent. Victoria heard as much as felt her pulse hammering in her chest and ears. As quiet descended, so did the stinging pain of her wounds. Her head swam in the deafening silence as her ears rang with the echoes of a thousand gunshots.
Behind her, Pallasophia rose to her feet. Now that the fighting seemed to be over, she avoided using her right side entirely. Stavros stood across the room, streaming blood, but still on his feet. He held a quick heal dispenser in one hand. The light atop the little capsule indicated that it was empty. With fast, jerky movements, he swept his rifle's light across the room's darkest corners, making sure nothing else lurked there.
Eleni, somehow the least injured of them all, levered at the gigas-thrown table with a long pipe, trying in vain to move the heavy piece of furniture. She paid the rest of them no attention.
Victoria withdrew her own vial of quick heal from her pocket. She spread single-area doses on the worst of her wounds, emptying the device entirely. Without no conscious thought, she withdrew a second vial, dialed it to full strength and emptied the container into her mouth.
A welcome mixture of relief, numbness, and tingling set in across her entire body. In moments, the pain itself was gone. Her injuries persisted; even the accelerated healing from the chemicals in the little egg-shaped thing could only do so much so quickly.
“Gods between us,” Eleni muttered. Her voice barely made it through the ringing in Victoria's ears, but when it did, the tone froze her blood.
Victoria turned to see Eleni throwing the body of a fonias aside. Stavros was one step away from her. Despite being barely able to walk himself, he dragged one of the smaller mikros away from the pile. Both of the mastigas had been crushed by the heavy laboratory table. Their helmets, and the skulls inside, were shattered and flat. Limbs bent in sickening directions.
Eleni's face was still shrouded by her helmet, but Victoria could see a little sliver of skin between it and the woman's collar. Perhaps it was the contrast between her skin and the dark uniform, but she looked bone-white.
Victoria almost asked what shocked her when her eyes fell on the object at her feet. Eleni knelt before a pair of boots, twisted and mangled like the mastigas she had tossed aside. One foot pointed to the side, but the spur of bone sticking out of the top of the boot sent a clear message. The other foot was crushed completely, folded back on itself.
They were not mastigas shoes.
She crossed the room as quickly as her ankle would let her. The pain was already gone thanks to the powerful chemicals in the quick heal, but the joint still lacked the ability to support weight. Without the pain itself to warn her, Victoria found herself stumbling constantly as that foot refused to function for more than a second.
Eleni unbuckled her helmet and dropped it. The cable on the back kept it attached to her backpack, but it hung loose and forgotten. Victoria's initial impression had been right; Eleni's face was a deathly shade of white.
Victoria dropped heavily down beside her, landing hard on the muscle of her hips as her ankle gave one last protest and buckled. She sat in silence for a moment until Stavros and Pallasophia joined them.
“I'm sorry,” Victoria said after another moment. Her voice was quiet and scratchy, like she had been screaming and never realized it. The previous day, she would not have imagined caring so deeply about the loss of one of their team.
Yesterday, they had not been “her” team.
Eleni flinched, then, “you did everything you could. I know that.” She laughed, but the sound was hollow. “I'm not some holo-drama soldier, ready to fly off the handle as soon as someone gets killed. It hurts, yeah, and Lochias Photeos was a good CO, but we all knew the risks coming down here.”
Victoria nodded slowly. “I understand.”
“Thanks.”
“This is the second to last level,” Pallasophia announced. The apparent non sequitur drew both Eleni and Victoria's attention. She tried and failed to get her holoprojector to work, presumably to display the map, but it had been destroyed in the fight. After a moment, she said, “we come back for his body, to all their bodies, after we sweep the last floor.”
“There won't be anything down there.” Victoria felt it in her bones, somehow. She then pointed upward. “Or there. They were all here, and now they're all dead.”
Pallasophia turned, regarding her with curiosity. “Have can you be sure?”
Victoria glanced at the sophont, buried under the bodies of two gigas. One of its stick-thin limbs stuck out to the side, as though it had been scrabbling to free itself.
“I'm not sure. I just know we're alone now,” she admitted after a moment.
Eleni rose to her feet. “Intuition?”
“Perhaps,” Victoria said.
Eleni gestured to where Photeos's body lay. Her voice was mostly calm, tinged with its fair share of tension, but no one would have accused her of being irrational or hysterical. Angry, perhaps, but it was controlled. “That's where our intuition would have led, so you'll forgive me if I don't trust yours.”
“That could have been any of us.”
Pallasophia gestured to the room around them. “None of us ever expected any of this.”
“That reminds me.” Victoria wheeled around and faced the Second Lord. “How in the hell did you not know the mikros grew into sophonts?”
“I have no answer for you,” Pallasophia said, voice dark. She spoke formally, a stark contrast in comparison to Victoria's demands. “Rest assured, I will be asking some pointed questions at the next Council meeting. Stavros, record everything we learned here.”
“Understood.”
Victoria paced away from the three surviving Technocrats. She faced the sophont, staring down at its corpse. Up close, she could see the similariti
es between it and the mikros—and between it, the mikros, and the elite.
She continued looking at the dead mastigas as she spoke. “As to why I think this was all of the mastigas. There was a certain logic to what they did here. They drew us in, separated us, and did their damned best to kill us all. That's not the sort of thing that happens by chance.
“I fought them when 'chance' was all they had to work with.” She was pacing now. “Random encounters in the halls and rooms. Those were like encountering wild animals. Angry, territorial, brutish. These,” she jabbed and angry finger at the veritable mountain of corpses, “fought with a unified purpose. To kill us all.”
Victoria pointed now toward the sophont's corpse. “That was the difference.” She turned in place, nearly falling as she placed weight on her damaged ankle, and approached the Technocrats again. “So there might be a few left, ones that didn't get 'the message,' but they're going to be upstairs, between us and the exit.”
“I suspect you're right,” Pallasophia said. “But first, we need to get out of this room and find somewhere we can rest.”
Chapter 17
First Lord Hyperion stared out his office window at the ocean beyond. Twenty-one generations of Pterygan Hexarchs saw that same view, plus or minus a few hundred meters of shoreline. He supposed that some descendant of his would eventually have to abandon the office, but until the sea swallowed the rest of this headland, he supposed it would do just fine. Besides, it would not be his problem at that point.
He inhaled a deep lungful of salt air, relishing the atmosphere that permeated his planet. With his windows shut, the sounds of the waves never reached his ears, but nothing in the palace could successfully keep out the smell of the ocean. It was an old smell, one that told a story of his planet's great age.
That was just as well, he thought. After spending ninety-five years working in the same office, it was only fitting that it smell like the rest of the palace. Some of the awards and small items decorating the office were even older than his claim on Pteryga's Hexarchate; some even predated his own life. Here and there mementos belonging to his predecessor, First Lord Asphaleia, and even some that came from her Hexarch, littered the walls.
In fact, Hyperion knew that if we opened the right boxes or moved the proper things, he could uncover everything from medals and trinkets to the elevation paperwork belonging to Pteryga's Hexarchs for hundreds of years. If he was being completely honest with himself, which only the privacy of his office really allowed, he would much rather spend some time working to see what pieces of the distant past he could uncover.
It was certainly preferable to dealing with the present, as the beep from his work desk reminded him.
The alert sounded again and Hyperion grumbled under his breath. There were very few people in the binary who could truly get under his skin, but the Hexarch of Dasos was one of them. Aegesander and he, at one point, had been close friends and co-workers, but a variety of things over the years had driven them apart.
Hyperion preferred not to dwell on those things, but he also learned from them. Long-range comms were the only way he would meet with Aegesander anymore. Both men knew he had no evidence for his suspicions, but that changed nothing.
He crossed the spacious office to the door and locked it. Unlike many other Hexarchs, he did not rely directly on human security. No one waited on the other side of secret doors to rush to his aid if something happened, nor did they keep a sniper's watch on his windows just in case something suspicious happened.
By contrast, his office's security was provided by much more basic means—the men and women who made up his security force patrolled the area around his little building, and the stone making up his walls was a thin veneer atop starship alloy plating that stood for a thousand years. Nothing would ever get close enough to his office to hurt him and First Lord Hyperion could still maintain his privacy.
That privacy had caused no end of rumors, especially since the deaths of Meriones and Ophion. Both of them had been close friends of Hyperion's for some time, and their deaths hit the Hexarch hard and made him rethink his approach to security. Rather than add more guards, Hyperion reinforced the building's armor and eliminated the human element entirely.
Both men died within a decade of the Mastigas's arrival. Hyperion knew no connection existed there—until they hit Kipos twenty-five years after their arrival, the mastigas never attacked anything outside the fringes of the binary—but that did not stop him from enacting tighter security.
Very few people, such as his former pupil Tritogenes, merited entrance into his private office. Hyperion conducted most of his business in one of two different places as a result. First, highly public areas such as the Council chamber, or other, similar, if smaller, places with an audience in attendance. The other was via holo, as yet another impatient beep from his desk reminded him.
With the door securely locked, Hyperion returned to his desk in time for another beep from his comm equipment to remind him once again of the call waiting for him.
Hyperion smoothed an errant hair from his long, white beard. It had an unfortunate tendency to bristle in Pteryga's humid air, and he usually kept such things pinned down with a set of six rubies twined into the coarse hair. Today was an exception, however, and there was little he could do beyond straightening it.
Drawing himself up taller and gazing down at the visual pickup where it sat at chin-level, he reached out and finally accepted the call.
In a moment, his holographic workspace vanished. Replacing it was a projected bust of First Lord Aegesander. The projection's eyes lined up exactly with Hyperion's own camera, allowing him to treat those with whom he met as though they were actually in the room. It also had the effect of forcing him to look down slightly, emphasizing his already impressive height and build.
Aegesander smiled, creating an odd effect against the crescent moon motif that dominated one half of his face. He then bowed formally, causing the projection to partially drop out of Hyperion's view. When he returned, the smile had vanished, replaced with a stern look which was itself covered over by another smile.
“Good day, my friend,” Aegesander began. “Have I caught you at a bad time?”
Hyperion smiled and shook his head. He knew Aegesander would see exactly how fake his smile was, but after so many years, Hyperion cared little for that particular talent of his. More to the point. Aegesander was making no effort to project any sort of authenticity in his own facial expressions.
That told Hyperion a few things, first and most important among them was that Aegesander was as alone as he was. If any of his subordinates were around, his fellow Hexarch would certainly have put more effort into making himself seem genuine.
Hyperion allowed his smile to fade, relaxing his face and letting his neutral expression convey his actual feelings. His tone, however, remained genial. “Of course not. I was simply taking a few minutes for myself to appreciate the ocean.”
Aegesander's false smile never wavered. “Your palace does have a rather pleasant view of the ocean,” he said, waited a moment, then added, “at least from what I remember.”
“It has been some time since you've visited my planet, hasn't it?”
Aegesander nodded sadly. “Twenty years.”
“You're not forbidden from setting foot on Pteryga, Aegesander.”
Aegesander raised an eyebrow. “So you say.”
“So I say.”
Aegesander laughed. “Am I to believe that if I were to land on Pteryga that you would not have me followed, shepherded here and there by your guards, and denied access to your palace?”
“I've told you for years, Aegesander, that you're not forbidden from my planet. We're both Hexarchs.”
“Only forbidden from your presence.”
Hyperion frowned. “Aegesander, if you contacted me simply to berate me for refusing to allow you into my presence alone, I've got better things to do. You know as well as I do that you're not the only one.”
“Yes,” Aegesander grated. “Eurybia, who I should note you have had removed from your palace, is also forbidden from being alone with you.”
Hyperion glared. “She threatened you as well as me.”
“And that particular incident was dealt with many years ago.” The fake smile returned. “We've even become friends.”
“How you managed that, I'll never understand.”
Aegesander's face closed off for a moment. “I managed it because Eurybia is not an unreasonable person.”
Anger flared up somewhere deep inside Hyperion. He knew he was not being unreasonable. He knew someone killed Meriones and Ophion, even if he could not prove who that someone was. Limiting access to his person to those he knew he could trust beyond a shadow of a doubt was the only logical outcome.
He stared at the holo of Aegesander's thin face, stroking his beard absently as he did so. It only took a moment for him to regain control over his emotions. During that moment, however, he thought strongly about ending the conversation right there, but that would give Aegesander more satisfaction than Hyperion thought he deserved.
“Let us start again. What can I do for you, Aegesander?”
Aegesander smiled, genuine this time. Hyperion was sure he thought he won their little sparring match. They never had these arguments, not these specific ones, when others could overhear and so Hyperion did not care whether Aegesander thought he won or lost.
“My friend, I simply wanted to discuss Project Titan. Eurybia tells me she met with Enyalios and Tritogenes yesterday. Second Lords Panatakis and Helena are already on Prosgeiosi and Daniel will be arriving on Eurybia's ship.”
Hyperion kept his expression carefully neutral, filing that information away. Tritogenes and Enyalios, especially the former of the two, would not have gone with her without some serious social maneuvering. He was actually rather impressed she managed to pull that off and made a mental note to speak to Tritogenes about it.
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