by Alex White
“Good day, mistress. How can I be of ser—”
“Give me the codes to shut down the dispersers and autoturrets,” she ordered.
“Uh, folks,” called Orna, peering through the door at the end of the hallway. She ejected the hyperbattery cable from Charger’s legs, which had begun to seize up from overloading.
“I’m afraid that’s not possible,” said the thrall, cocking his head. “Those must run in perpetuity.”
Nilah shook him by the collar. “I know the sodding directive! How do I shut them down?”
“The Masquerade data grid is a human-in-the-loop system,” said the thrall. “So there’s only one way to shut it down.”
She released him, stepping back. He climbed to his feet, limping. When she looked down, she saw his ankle turned at a strange angle, though the smile never faded from his face.
“What’s going on?” Aisha said as she approached, checking her clip. “We’ve got to keep going!”
“Damn it, Rabbit and Bear, get the hell over here!” said Orna, stepping down out of Charger’s exoskeleton.
The bot made a few sad noises and pointed to its legs.
“I know, I know,” Orna sighed, unholstering her slinger. “Look, I’m sorry, but we needed the speed. Just walk on your hands, and I’ll fix you later.”
Nilah and Aisha jogged to the end of the hall, stepping over thralls and shattered barricades. When they reached the opening to the data center, they stopped dead. The overwhelming stink of body odor and disinfectant washed over them.
“Team Wolf,” said Armin, “your signal is degrading. I can’t make out what you’re seeing.”
Row upon row of thralls sat wired into consoles, tapping away at projections. Goggles covered their eyes, and bedsores covered much of the rest of them. Nilah tried to make a quick count, but there had to be over a thousand of them locked inside the arched structure.
“It’s a …” Nilah breathed. “It’s horrible, sir.”
Nilah’s thrall came limping up to her, his ankle making a chilling crackle noise. Sweat coated his brow, and his skin was ashen. “Welcome to the Hive. This is our distributed, human-in-the-loop logistics, navigation, and defense center. A single servant is enough to run the entire defense grid, so even if one dies—”
“The others can take their place,” Orna finished.
“We’re running out of time,” said Armin. “The dialogue isn’t going well, and Eagle Team won’t stay flat forever. Shut it down.”
All those innocent people sitting helpless before Nilah. Even if she wanted to put her slinger to each of their faces, she’d be slaughtering them for hours.
“Sir, it’s not a normal data center,” said Aisha, her knuckles going white around the butt of her slinger. “They’re thralls. Hundreds of thralls.”
Static came over the line as Armin’s next message broke up. Of course the Hive would be comm-shielded.
“They’re already dead,” said Orna, quietly. “They were killed when the spikes went in. I know I’ve been a monster in the past, but—”
“It’s okay,” said Nilah. “We have to do this.”
“If you attack any of them,” said Nilah’s thrall, “they’ll all wake up and fight back with any spells they have.”
Even if they didn’t cast, the team’s meager slingers wouldn’t be enough to fight off a barrage of bodies. Nilah cursed and snatched the hyperbattery from Charger’s utility belt. Orna took one look at her and knew exactly what her plan was.
Orna pulled out a snapwire kit and handed it to Nilah. “Oh, man, the captain is going to be pissed when he finds out what you did with the power source for his future jump drive.”
“Give me a C-PROM, too,” said Nilah, pulling a single round out of her slinger mag. “I need to set a timer.” She peeled the snapwire contacts and placed them against the glowing head of the bullet, then connected the tiny controller chip.
“Why? What’s going on?” asked Aisha.
Within seconds, Nilah had rigged up the slinger round in series to the pure crystal of the hyperbattery. The device began to heat up in her hands as the feedback loop caused a runaway reaction. She traced her mechanist’s mark and psychically connected the C-PROM, writing a few lines of primitive code—just enough to make a detonator.
“Remember that super-expensive eidolon crystal we found in Bill Scar’s quarters?” Nilah gave Aisha a pained look. “We’re going to use it as a bomb.”
Boots dreamed of a reindeer, standing before her and inspecting her like a piece of butchered meat. He gently reached toward her face, though his hands were human.
“Damn, girl,” he said, in the cadence of her most-hated enemy, Stetson Giles. His murderous grin flashed through Boots’s mind: the moment he gunned down Gemma. “That bad attitude finally caught up with you, didn’t it?”
A musical voice echoed in her empty head, and everyone looked to the heavens; another god was speaking. “Code black. All security personnel, code black.”
“Their minds still contain all of the information you require,” said the eagle, inclining his head to look down his beak at the crow. “I’ll sell them for a million argents apiece.”
“How very convenient that you should bring them to me,” said the crow, “when they’ve been a thorn in my side. Do you think I’m stupid, Captain Lamarr?”
Stetson straightened up and took a short step backward. “I don’t know how you got here, Boots,” he whispered, “but you can’t touch me. And even if you could—”
A low rumble filled the station. Was it the thunderous anger mounting in her flattened mind?
As if in answer, the Central Promenade went bloodred and klaxons rang out. A gentle voice said, “Emergency: All celebrants report to your quarters. Repeat—”
Then the eagle took a long slide and slapped the hell out of Boots. Her dulled senses returned and the world shifted into perfect focus. She wasn’t dreaming; Stetson Giles stood before her, the grin fading from his face.
“Guess again, bastard,” she growled, snapping out the hidden blade in her metal arm. She leapt toward him and jammed it into his gut as far as it would go. The air rushed from his lungs and she shoved him backward into the deck.
Slinger fire lit the Promenade as Cordell opened up on the crow, putting five shots into its head and chest. The corvid went down in a spray of blood, and when the last shot hit the center of its mask, the gem inside exploded into glittering pink mist, taking most of its face.
Boots slapped Jeannie, instantly awakening Alister, who was linked to her mind. He, in turn, smacked Malik, and all of them focused fire on the downed crow, not taking any chances. A strange calm followed as the enemy guards took in what had just happened.
Then a huge black glyph erupted from the weasel in the back, smashing into the air like a hammer strike. A horrible wail, a symphony of fury, filled the Promenade. Boots had heard that song before in the Special Branch Archives.
The crow was a decoy.
Cordell jumped out in front as the shadows rose around them, hammering his shield with bladed tendrils. Blackness encapsulated them, reaching out, slicing at their bodies, and it took everything Boots had to jump out of the way. To flee outside his shield was to die in the many-bladed night.
Against Mother, they’d had a trick up their sleeve—grenades filled with indolence gas. Against the old prime minister, they’d had a sound containment strategy, and the greatest sharpshooter they could’ve acquired. Their strategies had hinged on rock-solid planning around keystone moments—just like with Izak Vraba. However, the keystone of this plan had just crumbled, and hungry magic swirled through the Promenade, rising like a tide to devour them all. Slinger bolts impotently pinged across the slick black surface of Vraba’s spell, and Boots could just barely make out the weasel’s smile before he disappeared in a swirl of shadows. Without intervention against the unopposed magic of a God of the Harrow, they’d be skewered in seconds.
Good thing Boots had brought a backup plan.
She pulled the bolt on her arm and locked the firing pin for her ship-to-ship slinger round.
“Suck on this,” she breathed, taking aim at Vraba.
The flash blinded her. The boom deafened her. But through it all came the sharp pain of her arm turning to hot shrapnel. Bits of metal sliced her face and chest.
The shock wave tossed all of them from their feet, and she went sprawling across her back, then her shoulder, then her neck. Each individual cobblestone of the Promenade’s walkway tore at her body. When she finally skidded to a halt, the world swam in her periphery, and blood leaked from her brow into her eyes.
“Captain!” she cried out, but she couldn’t hear her own voice over the ringing. Through the blur, she tried to make sense of the raging inferno she’d caused. It was all heat and light, hungry flames coming for her in the dusky red light.
All except an inky spot, a black sphere with a ragged edge.
The orb unfolded, revealing Vraba, his illusory weasel mask half blown away. When her eyes adjusted, she could make out the rivulets of blood running from his furious face, his flowing black hair, and a gaping wound where his shoulder should’ve been.
She’d missed.
The god let out a primal scream of anguish, and the shadows leapt to stanch the bleeding, working their way into his shoulder like snakes. He centered up for another attack as howling wind replaced her deafness. The air whipped at them, and she realized in horror that she’d caused a hull breach.
Stetson lay on the ground, clutching his gut, a data crystal at his side. He reached out with shaking fingers and pulled it under himself, blood spilling out around the stag-head disguise’s mouth. Hull sealing spells rolled from their emergency emplacements, popping out of hidden recesses in the walls to seal the breach. The roar became a high-pitched whine, then went silent.
Cordell rolled onto his back and ripped off the eagle mask, cramming it into his pocket with a groan. The twins were already helping Malik to his feet, and he clutched his side, trying to hold his guts in. Vraba’s guards had been blown to pieces in the exchange.
The thousand wails of the shadow song harmonized into the words, “You die today.” Night spread around Vraba into the form of a colossal spider, each foot tipped with a hammer. The god screamed, suspended at the center of the creature like a foul heart consumed with rage. He made no illusions of his hatred—he wanted to look them in the eyes as he crushed the life from them.
Apparently, losing his arm had pissed him off pretty good, so at least he and Boots understood each other.
The spider raised its forelegs above itself, preparing to smash Cordell with a pair of mallets. Boots clambered to her feet as Cordell staggered to his. He was so dazed, she doubted he’d see the end coming. And so she did something she never would’ve imagined two years ago—she barreled straight for him on unsteady legs.
Boots tackled Cordell out of the way as the hammers came down, shattering the floor of the Promenade. Stone slabs came loose like puzzle pieces, battering the pair as they rolled clear of the blow. Hundreds of spikes lanced out for her, and Cordell traced his glyph, blocking them out with a weak shield.
Other blades of darkness circled around the back of them, cutting off their escape routes, and bright cracks formed in their blue energy field. Her panicked eyes met his, and through Cordell’s concentration, she could almost read his thoughts.
This is it, Bootsie. We tried.
She dropped her slinger and took his hand as the first tendril wound through the shield and held it tight. The shadow sprouted a scalpel and reared back to strike at Cordell’s neck. When the shield went down, they’d both be skewered.
A bright bolt sailed through the air, striking Vraba in the stomach, and the shadows recoiled, giving them some air. Boots traced its path back to Jeannie, teeth bared and screaming as she fired again and again.
A wall of night spilled over Vraba’s exposed form, blocking the rest of her shots. The slinger spells splashed against it, tiny pops of lethal fire rendered harmless.
“Get back to the ship!” Jeannie roared to her brother, who bore Malik over his shoulder. “Go now!”
A lash of darkness swept toward Jeannie, and she barely dodged out of the way, but she didn’t retreat. She stood her ground, emptying her clip into black space around Vraba.
The shadow spider lumbered toward her, snapping down trees and crushing park benches. It made no attempts to dodge her fire, barreling through the barrage toward Jeannie’s tiny body.
But she stood her ground and reloaded once more.
Boots snatched up her slinger from the ground and sprinted for the beast’s backside, trying to get a good angle, hurdling over ruined furnishings and downed revelers.
Then she spied the chink in Vraba’s armor—he’d only covered the front of his body. She took careful aim with her shaking arm at the back of his head and gritted her teeth. One half of her body was on fire from the recoil of her slinger round, the other half was a wobbly mess.
But she had to fire.
The spell lanced out and splashed against the inside of Vraba’s bubble, striking just shy of his head. A spray of flame blinded him, and he wheeled on her, smashing the mezzanine walkways with a shower of sparks. One of the god’s eyes was closed, his face burned, but he still carried on.
She scarcely noticed his good eye dart toward something behind her, and when his hammers came rushing in her direction, they were shattered by disperser bolts. Boots turned to see an approaching set of platforms, armed to the teeth with angry thralls, portable dispersers, and autoslingers. So the Masquerade had more defenses after all.
“Eagle team, status!” called Armin.
“Vraba is tearing up the Central Promenade!” Boots shouted into her comm. “He’s turned into some kind of huge spider thing!”
“Damn it! Just hold on!”
“What the hell does—” But she had to duck out of the way of a falling strut.
Vraba wrapped himself in a cocoon of thick, liquid darkness as the dispersers zapped impotently at the core of his spell. More security forces swarmed from the other side, and a hail of fire illuminated both sides of him.
Boots tapped her comm with her slinger hand. “We’ve got wounded, but Vraba is dead to rights. Only a matter of time before—”
The black bubble swelled to twice its size, sucking in nearby atmosphere with a loud hiss. A pair of sledgehammers rocketed out of the top and bottom of it, wedging against the floor and ceiling of the Promenade. The Masquerade reverberated with a horrible groan as its load-bearing struts began to bend, and Boots was rocked from her feet.
“I’ll sift the wreckage for my index,” wailed the polyphonic voices, and muscular darkness reinforced the hammers, pressing harder.
Boots tapped her comm again, staggering to her feet. “Prince, he’s going to rip apart the station!”
“Copy that. Prince inbound.”
And what good would a datamancer be? There could be no running from this. Boots and the others would be swept into hard vacuum, and Vraba could await rescue by his marauder in his perfect cocoon. Boots watched the thralls reload their slingers and redouble their fire, but it would be no use. Again and again came the bass thump of heavy dispersers, targeting Vraba’s thick appendages to no avail. The creak of the load-bearing supports became a bone-grating screech, and any second, the vacuum of space would rip them all from this life.
Cordell called to his comrades, his voice breaking with the force of his shout. “Everyone get to the—”
A new noise joined the creaking of the Masquerade’s hull—the whine of a high-performance luxury yacht, barreling down the Central Promenade. The sleek archrome form of the Scuzzbucket rammed through trees, crosswalks, and security thrall platforms as it blasted toward Vraba’s cocoon.
A pair of pincers erupted from the shadows and caught the hardened nose of the ship, stopping it dead in its tracks with a screech. Giant knives spiked into the bridge, shattering the windows and perf
orating the Scuzzbucket’s frame. Still, the blue flames of the yacht’s engines roared; its maneuvering thrusters popped with gas to keep it upright.
“Armin!” came Cordell’s voice over the comm. “Armin, damn it, what the hell are you doing?”
“I’m bringing the engines to full, Captain,” grunted Armin, and the Scuzzbucket’s tail flared even brighter.
The thousand voices cried out as the pincers began to give, centimeter by centimeter, shaking as their strength failed them. Then, like a knife slipping between a pair of ribs, the Scuzzbucket ripped through Vraba’s cocoon, splattering the god across its nose.
The shining yacht lost control, crashing against the wall of the Promenade, grinding Vraba’s corpse into nothing more than blood and bad memories.
With the shadows gone, Boots finally got a good look at her comrades on the other side. Cordell was scarcely upright, and the twins fared little better with Malik. She ran to them, even though every bone in her body urged her to lie down and die.
“Armin!” screamed Cordell. “Armin, answer me!”
More klaxons rang out, and the gentle voice of the station said, “Attention all celebrants, there has been an incident. Primary reactors breached. Containment at thirty-two percent. Please report to your rooms immediately for station escape protocols.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Boots saw Stetson climb to his feet and drag the mask off his face. Blood ran down his brow into one eye, but he glared at her with the other. She raised her slinger to shoot him, but he turned to hobble away.
If she shot, she’d never find his room, never get the chalice, and if he went to ground, she might not find him again.
“Damn it!” she cried. “Captain, I’ve got to go after him.”
Cordell snatched her wrist as she made to run. “Containment failure! Do understand that? This station is going down, Boots!”
Stetson’s betrayal had cast a shadow over every day of her life after the war. He had ruined her, cast her out of her future, and she would take what she was owed. She bored into Cordell with her gaze, a display of insolence she’d never dared in all her days aboard his ship.
