by Rachel Caine
. . . but it wasn’t a ship. I caught the undulating motion first, the lucid gleam of starlight on shiny carapaces as the swarm twisted and changed shape.
“Phage!” I screamed, and kicked off for the airlock. “Bea, send word to the Sliver, right now! All defenses up as soon as I hit the door!”
FROM THE WORLD COURT INVESTIGATIVE FILES, CASE 98305743
SUBJECT: DELUCA, TORIAN
Transmission intercept [date redacted], Recording Agent [identity redacted]
DELUCA: Don’t tell me to let it go, Ashe. That damn crim destroyed billions in clear profit.
ASHE: You sure this isn’t more about your kid? Look, her purse got jacked. She flashed money in the Zone. Anybody would have lifted her purse. Just bad luck it was this Zara girl.
DELUCA: She’s no idiot. Second she clocked I was on her trail, she grabbed the prototype chem and tossed the box. You think it’s an accident some no-hope Zone cooker ended up with the exact same formula that was in the box? That I have to buy supply from the Zone now instead of selling to it? She stole from me, burned me, and got away. I don’t get her, my business won’t ever recover.
ASHE: Sir. She’s a damn Honor. She’s in space. How do you think you’re going to get her now? News says she’s gone on the Journey. She’s not coming back here.
DELUCA: Then we go get her. Bring me the boy, Derry McKinnon.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Binding Resources
THE CONSTRUCTION PALLETS weren’t speedy. They’d take time to dock, offload their crews to the Sliver. While they were between us and the station, they were vulnerable, and the Sliver couldn’t raise their defensive shields without abandoning the crews.
I wasn’t shocked when the Sliver’s shields flared silver around it. Bacia did strike me as ruthless. The construction pallets hadn’t reached safety yet, and they immediately came to a halt, hovering in place. We had to defend ourselves, and them.
Heart roaring in my ears, I raced for the airlock. Bea was there waiting to pull me in. Every second we spent spooling up my umbilical, the Phage were getting closer, to us, to the helpless workers Bacia had sentenced to die.
With Bea’s help, I slammed the airlock shut and said, “Nadim, can we take these workers in? Like you did with our disabled Hopper?”
“Our docking bay can’t hold the entire work crew,” he answered. “But I’ll save those I can and ask Typhon to gather the rest.” I sensed him moving at speed to intercept the first, smaller work transport. It was just going to fit inside his hold, I thought.
Typhon was bigger, so maybe we could protect everyone—or, at least, keep them out of the direct line of fire. I pulled my helmet off because insect vision was distracting, and my curls sprang free. I was drenched with sweat under the skinsuit, which was trying to earnestly wick it away and stabilize my temp, but the sweat came from adrenaline and fear. When Nadim came about, I braced against the wall and felt him. He was scared, but not like our first, bewildering battle against the Phage. This time golden anticipation threaded through his fear, alongside the deep red of determination. He understood what we were facing now. I had no doubt that he’d spent time studying the recordings of everything we knew about them . . . how they moved, and what killed them most effectively.
If he’s good, I’m good.
My nerves settled a little from that brief contact, and I rushed through the passageway to Ops. “Let’s lock down the docking bay. I’m sorry to the contractors, but it’ll be chaos if we let them run all over the place.”
Bea nodded. “On it. Sealing the doors.”
“Taking on extra weight in three . . . two . . . one.”
I felt the jolt of Nadim rescuing the workers, which was good, but the maneuver brought us closer to the Phage. My stomach heaved when I remembered fighting them on Typhon’s ravaged decks. Nadim didn’t have any internal defenses installed yet, so if they boarded . . .
Trying not to think about the worst-case scenario, I said, “Shields up. Get Starcurrent on the comms to talk to the contractors; explain they need to hold on tight.”
“Hear and responding, Zara,” Starcurrent said over comms. “Am of little use to you here, will join them to explain in person. Less frightening to see the familiar. Workers may find ways to help. Will inquire.”
The armor that had caused Nadim so much pain was now making me feel intensely better; it was a very fancy grade of impenetrable. The longer we kept them out, the more of them we could kill with weapons and maneuvers.
The weapons we’d just installed were supposed to be better than the ones that Beatriz and I had jury-rigged, and I’d asked for them to be specifically calibrated to repel the Phage; they’d fire not one large projectile, but a spray of small, high-energy pellets, like a giant space shotgun. No autocannons yet, and I wished for something like space napalm, though that was a physical impossibility since there was no oxygen in vacuum.
“Pulling away from the station,” Nadim said. “Coordinating with Typhon. All workers now in our holds.”
Moving away was a good precaution. When we went weapons hot, our fire might tear through the Sliver’s defenses, and we couldn’t afford to find out how Bacia would retaliate. Fighting on two fronts was an effective way to get dead.
I took a breath, two. Calm down, I told myself. I touched Nadim and found steadiness in him. We wove together—a light bond, the opening steps to plunge deeper when we needed it.
“Full-scene visual,” I said then. A dreadful thought occurred to me. “Uh, you can still do that? Even through armor?”
“I can control the opacity of the armor,” Nadim said. “It does not affect the durability. I can still give you full visuals.”
Bea took a step back, because she didn’t love it when part of Nadim seemed to vanish. As I watched through the transparent side of the ship, the Phage hesitated, torn between the Leviathan moving away from the Sliver and a tempting stationary target. I wasn’t sure how smart they were, but there was no doubting their predatory preference when they swirled after Nadim.
In the arena, Chao-Xing had said that I had an ability to see weakness where others couldn’t. Right now, all I could glimpse was the fact that the Phage were slower and weaker in smaller numbers. Split them up, slow them down. I locked onto that thought as Nadim powered up his guns. Typhon was already firing into the cloud, but the enemy was small and fast, hard to hit. Even when a blast hit some, more scattered; it was like shooting into a school of fish. Even with a shotgun, only so many took damage.
The Phage split up into two twisting columns, and I was weirdly reminded of spiral ladders of DNA as they whipped toward Typhon and Nadim, gaining speed.
It’ll be fine. We’ve got plating.
Still, sickness was rising in my stomach. We’d barely survived that first battle, and we weren’t ready for this. Not really. But that was how life worked, chucking you into situations you weren’t prepared for. The real test came in how you reacted.
Sink or swim.
Typhon was firing, lighting up the darkness around the Sliver, and his barrage of projectiles tore the hell out of the Phage column, scattering them like birds. But as soon as it paused, they reformed and came on ahead. The silence on our comm said that the Elder Leviathan and crew had enough on their hands without worrying about us. I steadied myself. If I panicked, Bea might too. Nadim needed both of us ice cold and focused.
He can’t do this on his own.
Just like that, I was good again. The jitters subsided, and I didn’t fret about how shit could break bad. For Nadim and Bea, I’d shut down everything that scared me and get this done. Phage. Weakness. Something was stirring in the back of my head, but I couldn’t pinpoint it just yet. Fine, let’s kick some ass while it simmers.
“There’s a disturbance in the docking bay,” Bea said.
I hit the comms. “Starcurrent! Lock that shit down!”
“Am trying!” ze shouted back. “Is not going well!”
While the workers were probabl
y scared, they should be at least glad we hadn’t left them stranded. But if they knew we were moving away from the Sliver . . . “Tell them if they distract us now, we all die, will you? We’ve got this. They need to sit their asses down and wait!”
“Yes, Zara. Am communicating so.”
Nadim dodged, turning and darting, drawing one long tail of the swarm away. Out here, though, it was darker. I didn’t like that. Nadim was still healing. “Any good suns near us?” I asked him.
“Yes,” he said. “I am going toward it.”
The distance between Nadim and Typhon was increasing, as both Leviathan tried to actively split the Phage force. Bursts of brightness in the black, as Typhon fired again and again. This was old news to him, whereas we were green as hell, but Typhon was also moving slower than Nadim. More gravely injured before, and still healing.
“Marko! What do you need?” I asked, hitting comms.
“Focus on yourself!” he shouted back. I saw a blur of his face on the screen, stark and pale as he concentrated on the boards. “Try to take out as many on your side as you can. If we let them reform . . .”
The first of the Phage had almost reached Nadim. Bad for them, because he quickly dumped speed and let them overtake, and I fired a brutal barrage of projectiles into the swarm before they could dodge. Phage carcasses spun, trailing freezing blood in lacy patterns. Bursts from Nadim’s railgun shook the whole ship, but Nadim leapt with the recoil like a teenager learning to dance. “What else we got?” I asked Nadim.
“Fire the particle laser on the widest beam,” he said. Shit. I’d already forgotten about that one, and I quickly spun to those controls, but Bea was already on it. I didn’t know when she’d made it to Ops, but there she was, and steady enough to flash me a quick smile as her fingers danced over the board.
“Setting up targeting parameters,” she said. Before she finished talking it was already done, and she slapped the controls to let the computer execute, because that was faster and more accurate. “It’ll fire when the maximum number of Phage come into alignment.”
It took about two seconds for that to happen. I got my balance and watched the particle laser burn through a swath of the Phage. Good.
“How many more shots do you have?” I asked.
“Twenty, if we cycle down the shields,” she answered.
“If not?” I didn’t want those things on his skin, oh hell no, not even with plating.
“Fifteen?”
“Then let’s make them count.”
Bea said, “I’ll see if I can free up some power, lower life support to minimal outside Ops and the docking bay.” She was already on it before I nodded.
I studied the swarm as the Phage came at us again. Railguns were down by 20 percent already; once those were gone, we wouldn’t be able to keep them off for long. I didn’t want to test the plate, not yet. I held fire as the front runners of the swarm spiraled toward us, and I dropped deeper into the bond. Hit them hard, I told Nadim, and felt his muscles flex as he slowed to put them alongside, then rolled and slammed hard into more than a hundred of them. The impact of the defense shield into the column vaporized most, and sent the next wave scrambling apart, shattering their formation. Nadim didn’t hesitate. He leapt forward again, toward the light of a distant star. I felt the far-off song of it, the waves of energy reaching into him. Food. I hadn’t realized how desperately hungry he was for it until the radiation began to energize him. It steadied him, cleared his mind, and mine too.
I replayed what I’d seen of the Phage’s attack in my mind. There was a repeatable rhythm to the swirl, I realized; the Phage didn’t move at random. I came up out of the bond for a moment, landed heavy in my own skin, and adapted quickly. I started to reach for the controls, then stopped myself.
We were a team. We needed to work as one.
“Bea, break down their patterns. I caught a couple of repetitions in the way they form up immediately after an attack. If we can anticipate, we can really fuck them up with an immediate second burst.”
She was in the bond now too, the three of us working smoothly as a team. I sensed Starcurrent, outside the bond, struggling to convince the very independent construction gang of their safety, but that was zis problem right now. We had a swarm to smash.
Typhon was on the edges of my awareness, a black, angry shadow, but very distant now. He’d gone at a tangent to separate the swarm as much as possible, and it was working. Our half was starting to slow down, while Nadim was powering up from the onrushing, nourishing sun.
It was all looking good.
That was when it all started to go very bad.
I felt the pain first, echoing through Nadim from an unexpected source: the docking bay, where Starcurrent was supposed to be keeping a lid on the situation. It was sudden, sharp, and shocking, and Nadim’s effortless flight faltered, more from surprise than any real disability. The Phage responded instantly to the second of hesitation in a lightning-fast attack. They hit the shields in a rain of bodies, destroying hundreds, but that didn’t matter; there were tens of thousands in the swarm. The Phage didn’t care about their own injuries. They cared about the prize. In other circumstances, I would have probably felt some admiration for that, but now, I just wanted to kill them all, fast. Nadim twisted, rolled, evaded, and the swarm fell behind again, but not far behind. They were tireless. They were ruthless. And they would not stop coming.
“Do you have enough for a dark run?” I asked Nadim. Stealth mode might save us right now. For how long, I didn’t know.
“I do,” he said. I caught a hint of falsehood to that; he had enough power to start one, but he wasn’t sure how long he could hold on to it. “When?”
“Bea, dual fire: particle laser and rail guns. Pick your shots. Nadim, as soon as she fires, use the confusion to go dark. Change course. Go under the sun, slingshot around, head back to Typhon.”
“Got it,” Bea said. “Analyzing the patterns . . . okay, locked in. Firing in three, two . . .”
One was silent, but Nadim’s whole body shuddered with the force of all his guns firing, and then he was moving fast, and shifting his body chemistry at the same time. Organic tech, bizarre and wonderful.
I need you, he told me, and I immediately leapt from my skin and into the bond, wholly committed. He caught me, and we merged into one creature.
Zadim went dark.
We rolled and swam for the star that burned and sang ahead. Dipped low, spread now-invisible solar sails to catch the streaming energy of the sun, the vibrant song of a new star hissing in our cells, singing in our bones, an aching and ancient melody that rose and fell like tides: the beat of a heart, a living thing. We felt the cold scrabble of the Phage as the swarm boiled and struggled for a target. Confused now that we had vanished. A quarter of the swarm drifted, smashed and silent.
A single Phage followed, as if it might sense our trail. Uncertain.
Now, the Zara part of us whispered, and we felt the surge ripple through our body as the dark run receded, showing us to the swarm.
It chased, thinking nothing of the danger, wondering nothing of the reasons.
We screamed into the gravity of the sun, folded our sails, and the song of the light rose to a screech, discordant and beautiful and ravenous. The armor protected us from the heat momentarily. Pain woke, and we pushed the sensations aside. The gravity crushed us, but we skimmed the edges like a stone, let it draw us forward and the momentum push us back out into the dark, looking down on the swarm that followed blindly on our trail.
Their mass was smaller, composed of tiny fragile pieces, and one by one, the sun dragged the spiral apart, scattered and destroyed them. Some escaped, but they were few and weak, and spun away into the dark. Lost.
We separated, me into my small, soft body, Nadim to his, and the loneliness of it, the loss, made my eyes water as I opened them and took in a deep breath, bracing myself on the console.
Bea knew what we’d done, but she didn’t comment. She was busy reporti
ng. “We’re clear for now,” she said. “Heading back toward the Sliver, tracking Typhon’s course.”
Nadim showed me how that fight was going before I could even ask. We had problems in the docking bay too, but Starcurrent would have to cope until we put down the Phage. I’d never been more conscious of how much a Leviathan needed a deep bond for max combat effectiveness. Whatever Typhon was getting from Marko and Chao-Xing, it wasn’t enough. I didn’t see any of the quicksilver intuition that came when Bea, Nadim, and I were working at peak efficiency.
Maybe Typhon’s wounds were slowing him down, or maybe—well, I didn’t know. But if we didn’t help him, he might not survive this fight. Nadim didn’t have enough energy for another dark run, and we were already running low on juice. Our lasers might just draw the Phage onto us, and I didn’t have a final solution for dealing with them. The rail guns could injure Typhon at this range.
I didn’t know nearly enough about the Phage.
While I was chewing on our next strategy, we arrived at the Sliver.
It was a mess. With Nadim gone, some of the swarm after Typhon had drawn off to attack the Sliver, whose silver shield was still up, but I could see by the readouts that it was stressing badly. As I watched, drone ships like the ones that had chased us on the dead planet poured out of the honeycomb docking area—Bacia’s holdout tech, I assumed, something they would only use in an emergency. The drones were small and light, completely automated, and they had weapons. They engaged the Phage one-on-one, blowing them effortlessly away, though it would take a while for that finite number of drones to eat their way through a swarm.
One added benefit: the movement and vibration of the drones lured more of the Phage away from the Elder.
“Now. Fire now.”
Bea switched to manual controls and unleashed a massive particle burst. We took out some of the drones as well. Too damn bad; Bacia could make more.
The drones had no sense of self-preservation, and some of them even seemed programmed for kamikaze maneuvers; they headed straight for the center of the biggest part of the swarm and detonated. Effective, but expensive, and not possible for us to imitate unless we built some drone ships of our own.
