Honor Bound

by Rachel Caine

  I sighed. “Let’s stay on the ion trail. And let me know if you can figure out where this relic is headed, Bea.”

  She nodded. “I’m on it, collaborating with Yusuf and Marko on analyzing possible targets. Based on what Starcurrent said . . .” Her voice trailed off to a mumble, which meant she was thinking aloud.

  “Talk to Suncross,” I told her. “He might have valuable intel about the systems up ahead.”

  The Sliver receded behind us, and at this remove, it gleamed like a knife. Ahead, there were shimmering colors, golds and purples, swirls of stardust. From orientation, I’d learned that the brightest colors often carried the most dangerous radiation, just like snakes on Earth. All these celestial bodies had names, but I preferred appreciating the beauty without slapping on labels like supernova remnant, quasar, or barred spiral. Nadim kept the wall clear, so I could see the austere allure of the stars we were chasing the god-king through. Filaments and ice dust, a cluster of burning blue that stole my breath. Space might kill me, but I couldn’t be sorry, even for a minute, when I appreciated how damn lovely it was.

  “What’s that?” Nadim would know the name.

  “Neutron star. Good for Elder Leviathan. If we slow, it would help Typhon.”

  “Do it. How does it sound?”

  In answer, Nadim drew me to him. Human equivalent, his arms around my shoulders, as my head hit his chest. Only for us, it was mind to mind, and I dropped into we, the most comfortable clothes I owned. In the link, we heard the low purr, soothing and deep like a bass drum. The song rolled over us, but there were discordant notes, echoing in the distance. We slid apart. I stumbled a little, drawing a look from Bea, but she was too busy to do more than cock a brow.

  I shook my head. “What was that?”

  “The god-king and his ship. It is a bond that should not be,” Nadim said. He sounded more bothered than I’d have thought. “Impossible to have such a bond with mechanicals!”

  “I think I’ve found a probable target.” Before Bea could elaborate, we passed from the ice and dust cloud into a bigger debris field, all flat surfaces, hard edges, everything spinning and twisting at different velocities.

  I tensed. The last time this happened, we’d stumbled into a Leviathan graveyard. “What is this?” I demanded.

  “Rock, mostly. Some metallic deposits.”

  “Organic material?” Starcurrent asked before I could.

  “Zara, there are life signs.” Bea looked as freaked as I felt.

  My stomach dropped. “Something’s still alive? In the middle of this? Is it the god-king?”

  “No,” Nadim said. “Something else. But we must cross this field to follow Lifekiller’s ship.”

  “Safely?” No answer. I sighed. “Do it.”

  Nadim twisted and dove, but sometimes he couldn’t avoid all the debris; it sparked and scraped on his protective plating, though, so I wasn’t too worried about him getting injured. Instead, I was thinking about a world that Lifekiller would find, somewhere up ahead. How he’d break it open like a snack machine back home, eating everything in sight.

  I felt a weird surge through my nerve endings, an instinct that I’d learned to heed, and I said, “Nadim? Where are those life signs exactly?”

  “The debris field disrupts smaller readings, but—”

  Starcurrent shouted, “Phage!”

  Damn, I hated being right. These twisting, turning rocks were perfect cover for the Phage. They were all over this asteroid field, some swimming in vacuum, and others leapfrogging from rock to rock. I figured they’d be on us fast. “Ready whatever we have!” I shouted. “Nadim, can you do any kind of evasive in this?”

  “Not much,” he said. “It’s all right, Zara. I have armor now. They will have to work much harder. We will be all right.”

  It sounded gentle, and sweet, and sure. It was also a lie. Nadim knew better. Both Leviathan were still tired, maybe up to 80 percent energy for Nadim, but Typhon was still healing from his last Phage attack, and probably no better than 60 percent. We’d lost the key advantage of maneuverability and speed, though if we had to blast out of here I’d do it, regardless of the damage. We didn’t have the energy reserves for a fight against both the god-king and the Phage, not now, maybe not ever.

  Hell, I wasn’t even sure how we were going to contain that bastard. If I was him, I’d have developed countermeasures against the Abyin Dommas, like, yesterday, but so far, he didn’t seem to be long on strategy. That was our one ace in the hole.

  I tensed up for the fight, because the Phage were coming at us fast, swarming forward in a broad, sweeping arc of bodies climbing and jumping and surging . . . “Bea! Do we have enough power for weapons?”

  “No,” she said. “One shot, maybe. Nothing much now.” She sounded shaky, but she was standing. We all were. If this was it, then we’d make a fight of it hand to hand if we had to. I’d killed the bastards before. I could do it again.

  “Wait,” Starcurrent said. “Something is different.”

  Ze was right. I expected that swarm to break in two and go right for us and Typhon, but . . . it broke around us.

  The Phage ignored us.

  I felt them skittering over Nadim’s armor, scrapes of chitin on plate, and I couldn’t help but convulsively shiver with revulsion; it was like being covered in roaches. But they were touching down from behind him, using him for a launchpad, and moving on.

  Typhon boomed on our comms then, and he sounded . . . well, like he was unraveling. “The Phage have never done this. There must be easier targets ahead, weak but living cousins. We must save them!”

  “Whoa, whoa, back up. We don’t know what’s out there, or why they’re running. Maybe it’s from something, not toward it.” Toward the god-king’s ship. I sure hoped that wasn’t true, but I felt a sick certainty it was.

  “More speed!” Typhon ordered. “We must find what they hunt!”

  He wasn’t going to listen to me, and I supposed he wasn’t going to listen to his crew, either. “Bea,” I said. “Anything on the projected course for the Phage?”

  “Nothing evident. I don’t understand. Leviathan are their preferred prey. This is . . . unprecedented.”

  “Keep Typhon calm. Don’t know what will happen if he lashes out right now. If they’re ignoring us, let them think we’re big chunks of rock.”

  “I will,” Nadim promised. “Typhon understands.”

  I wished I did. No joke, the Phage made me shudder. I could see them as we wove through the asteroid field. The rocks didn’t hurt us, and neither did our greatest foe. That was some inexplicable shit. Up close, the beasties were worse than alien; they were . . . empty. No individuality, no distractions. The closest comparison I could find was to an insect hive, but even that didn’t describe the behavior I was witnessing; not a single Phage demonstrated individual curiosity at anything around them. I was shivering, hard, by the time we cleared the rocks.

  “It’s like they can’t see us. Or hear us,” Bea whispered. “Why? What’s blinding them?”

  “Something is very wrong.” That came from Marko, connected via vid.

  “No shit,” I mumbled. “Try to keep Typhon on track if you can. We don’t have any other Leviathan on sensors; do you?”

  “Nothing,” Marko confirmed.

  “Nadim, can you hear your kin singing?”

  “No, Zara. I wish I could.”

  “Me too.”

  Just then, a blaze started on the viewport. In space, there wasn’t anything like a horizon, but the glow was such that it was like an inferno, even many light years away. Not huge yet due to sheer distance, but I could tell this star was massive. We’d come from the Sliver to a galaxy whose name I didn’t even know. Bea might be able to look up the Earth designation for it, probably just letters and numbers, glimpsed on high-powered telescopes.

  The planets in this system were gray and dead, pocked from a rain of comets and other celestial detritus. Around us, colors swirled in deadly glory, red and viole
t, laced with silver and gold. I couldn’t see the god-king’s ship with my naked eye, but we must have been on the right track.

  Nadim said, “It’s racing toward the sun.”

  “Does he want to die?” Bea asked.

  “Does not track,” Starcurrent said. “God-kings are not prone to self-ending. Murder, yes. Not suicide.”

  We followed but with more caution, while the god-king didn’t seem to care about heat, radiation, or gravitational pull. The star just got bigger and brighter, until Nadim had to add layer upon layer of diffusing shielding, and even then, it was hard to look directly at it. Outside, it would have cooked us like lobsters in boiling pots.

  “Nadim, be careful. Don’t hurt yourself.”

  “I’m approaching my limit,” he admitted. “I cannot go any closer. But the spectrum of energy is very good for both me and Typhon.”

  “This is where we guessed our god-king was going,” Bea said then. “Not that being right does us any real good now.”

  I considered our next move. Bacia might still want this thing, but I was aligning with Starcurrent. It would probably be better to kill this creature, if we even could. Ideally, I’d have liked to launch the god-king’s ship into the sun, but I had no idea how to get that done with our existing weapons. Attacking might just piss the Lifekiller off. Probably would; he didn’t seem like the stable type anyway.

  The sun’s titian glow flickered, darkening at the edges like a cigarette burning down. It took a second to parse what I was seeing. And then, it just happened so fast, there was no stopping it. One second, the star was full and alive and seething with energy, and then it was like the lights had just . . . turned out.

  I blinked, washing the afterimages from my vision.

  There was no sun now. Nothing that radiated any kind of brightness at all.

  It was ash and shadow.

  “Nadim?” I had trouble getting the name out. “Are we in trouble here? Is there a gravitational wave coming?”

  “No,” Nadim said. He sounded . . . afraid. “Nothing. Lifekiller ate everything. There’s nothing left, not even energy. Not even a black hole. It’s as if . . .”

  “As if it never existed,” I finished for him. “As if he erased it from existence.”

  There was a deep moment of silence.

  “Lifekiller has power now,” said Starcurrent. “We should run.”

  **ENCRYPTED PRIVATE SERVMAIL**

  From: Torian Deluca [September 18, 2142 3:34 AM, EST]

  To: Claudius Acorn, WHSC coordinator

  Subject: RE: A small request

  Dear Mr. Acorn,

  Yeah, right.

  Look, asshole, I don’t care who you are, who your father is, or where you went to school. You know what I have on you. I’m asking for a small favor, that’s all. Drag somebody down. Derry McKinnon goes up as an Honors alternate, or I burn your life to the ground. I don’t give a shit if he’s qualified. You make it happen.

  That’s it. I catch you trying to go around me again? Well, they didn’t find the last guy.

  —TD

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Binding Despair

  THIS THING DRANK stars.

  Not just stars. Huge stars. Monster red giants. What was it Nadim had hinted to me? That stars were, in some sense, alive? If this god-king could prey on a sun, how could specks of dust like us ever, ever fight him, much less beat him?

  “Zara,” Nadim said. “Join.”

  I ached for that comfort, and I leapt into the bond, deep as I could, submerging I into an entirely new entity, one with one mind, soul, thought.

  Zadim looked out on the devastation with Leviathan senses.

  This system had never been a cradle; these ancient, battered planets had never developed life in their own right. But the sun, the sun had been vast and vital and beautiful, and Zadim could still hear the echoes of its last, anguished song spreading through the universe, carried on pulses of light. The death of such a thing was deeply unnatural. Stars did die, slowly or quickly; they guttered out into sparks and darkness, spinning out their plasma as they aged, and some died in fury, collapsing inward and reversing into a gravity so relentless it allowed no song, no light, to escape. A selfish death, one never quite accomplished; those black holes remained frozen at the moment of oblivion, never to achieve it. Hungry, haunted places.

  But this was different.

  This was murder.

  The silvery form of Lifekiller’s ship—a mechanical thing, lifeless—exploded without warning, shedding metal fragments in all directions. Beneath that shed skin was something else, larger and harder, a sleek, jet-black hull that was kin to the Phage’s chitinous surfaces. It bristled with sharp points and edges, an aggressive, organic form that made the human part of us cringe. The Zara part glimpsed something that Nadim did not, a hint of something awful beneath. Her discomfited perceptions spread into Zadim’s awareness, and something emerged beneath the darkness of the black shell . . . a writhing, twisting wrongness that was beyond Nadim’s individual perceptions. Humans were attuned to predators.

  Lifekiller was changing. Growing.

  Soon, it would emerge, stronger than ever before.

  Typhon, Zadim reached out. It must be now.

  We cannot destroy this construct, Typhon replied, still alone, still lonely, though his Honors glowed bright within him. Zadim mourned for his empty, grieving solitude. All our weapons, all our strength will not damage the carapace it has forged. I am too weak, and you are too young, and this creature is too vastly powerful.

  Typhon, admitting defeat. It was worth a moment of wonder. But Zadim forged on. A physical attack will not be successful. But a different kind might be. Can you feel any living cousins? Anywhere, no matter how far?

  Zadim was too young for senses to stretch so far; there was nothing in our reach, no whisper of Leviathan song.

  Typhon finally replied, Yes. Groupings in other galaxies. A few scattered here, nearer.

  Tell them to sing, Zadim said. All of them. Sing of rest, of peace, of sleep.

  Zadim knew this was a danger. The harmonics of such songs, the kind that crossed empty space and found reception in Leviathan flesh . . . such songs could influence them, and Nadim was still tired, even with all solar sails deployed and drinking as much watery, distant light as possible. They had not been in the presence of the red giant for long before its horrible death. He already drifted close to dark sleep, even with all that Zara could do. The Leviathan song would resonate in him too. It would be a tide pulling him into sleep, the same as it would the Lifekiller.

  You are too weak, Typhon said. I am too weak. We will sing ourselves away.

  Make a bond, Zadim told him. You must. Now. It will hold you.

  Typhon said, I am afraid.

  He never would have said such to Zara Cole or to any small and relatively vulnerable Honor inside him. He would never have said it to Zadim but for the fear that this, at last, could be his last battle.

  Don’t be afraid.

  It was a faint new voice. Only a whisper. Typhon’s presence echoed with the feeling of small hands touching walls, of small voices lifted together. Almost insignificant. And yet.

  Don’t be afraid. One voice, leading two more. The Zara piece of Zadim recognized it as belonging to Yusuf, as damaged as Typhon, as bitterly grieving. We are strong. We will be stronger.

  Marko and Chao-Xing. She no longer held herself back; her blazing warmth shone clear. Marko was as steady as gravity, holding them together. With Yusuf, they were three planets circling an unwilling star.

  Don’t be afraid, Zadim echoed with kindness and understanding for the pain and loss and anguish that Typhon had felt, still felt, would feel again. We are with you.

  Typhon let go and sank into the bond.

  What came into existence was a new thing, strong and tough, with Typhon’s bitter, hard-won survival and Chao-Xing’s battle wisdom and Marko’s cool control and Yusuf’s lightning edge of beauty and pain.

&nb
sp; We are Lightstorm. The new creature took the name with awe and exaltation. It reflected none of their names, but that didn’t matter; they were one, and the one was strong.

  Bea fell into Zadim, adding brilliance and joy and a persistent kindness. Starcurrent swam in too, rich with songs and stories, bitter with scars. Can two Leviathan also merge? The question came from the fused being Zadim had become, larger than just pilot and ship.

  Try, said Lightstorm. There was an edge of pure joy in it.

  A leap together and again, something new was born: a resonance of minds, a giddy storm of thoughts, feelings, sensations. We are Men Shen. That name came from Chao-Xing, along with an image of two gods standing guard against two doors. Warriors. Protectors. Gods.

  From somewhere deep in the shared consciousness, Zara Cole approved. Gods to fight a god.

  The song of distant Leviathan, boosted through Typhon, hit like the leading edge of a storm. It swept through the shared tissues of Men Shen, built, amplified as Typhon and Nadim added more resonance. Yusuf, Zara, and Chao-Xing shaped the weapon made of the song. Starcurrent, Bea, and Marko found the target, a tiny point of weakness in the thick chitinous covering of the Lifekiller, and drove the song in like a lance of pure power.

  The shell cracked, exposing the form within to vacuum. A wave of thick, viscous liquid roped out. Amniotic fluid. That came from Beatriz, or perhaps from Marko; their individual voices blurred now, became shifting and indistinct in the new creature. It isn’t ready to be born. Hit it again.

  Before Men Shen could shape another lance of power, the carapace shattered down the center, spinning away in two ragged halves, and a monster swam free. The humans in the bond felt a wave of sickness, wrongness, bitter nausea; Starcurrent felt fury and horror, a familiar evil waking ghosts.

  Lifekiller might not be finished in his new form, but he was very large, almost the size of Typhon. He had no form, or all forms; he shifted and boiled, formed appendages and faces and snapping teeth, and with the speed of a predator, he grabbed for the enemy closest to it.