Eyes burning, she scanned for signs of Grandfather Spear. Fires burned blue and green and white hot in the upper tiers, erratically shinning through hole after hole of ruptured open decks. Angular, toxic shadows danced madly across the rubble. Broken machinery and the severed biomech organs of the pyramid were mangled together with the slick viscera from thousands of bodies. Dead faces everywhere, but not his.
A dull anxiousness grew in her chest as she waited for another surprise attack, another sudden death, another instantaneous failure to protect her new brood. But no shots fired. No forces ambushed them. Even the klaxons had fallen silent. Only the constant, echoing booms of the Monarchy attack and the rhythmic thud of the grank’s heavy steps.
The far wall of the grank pens stood nearest to the pyramid’s hull. A series of gated chutes led to hangars of drop ships. Each chute divided into nine tributaries designed to funnel granks from the pen to the cargo slots of the droppers. One of the chute gates had been smashed in. Gabriel and Ed must have gone that way. The light strips were all blown out inside the chute, but spasms of illumination flickered from the far end.
They entered the chute and came out into the hangar. One of the three droppers was missing. Sparks rained down from a frayed knot of cables dangling along the ceiling. Red blood painted the floor like morbid graffiti.
In the dead center of the hanger stood Daggeira, watching them emerge from the dark tunnel. She held a palukai configured as an assault rifle. The barrel swayed casually beside her leg.
Sabira told Orion to stop, and the biomech halted a couple of meters in front of Daggeira. Sabira crawled down the side of the beast and stood before her. Numbness and pain all melted together as one. It took all her strength to stand straight. She held her palukai like a supporting staff, tried not to show any weakness.
Daggeira didn't move at all as Sabira approached. She was also covered in grime and dust. Dark blood stained her uniform, was smeared across her face. “I was in the infirmary when shit started blowing up. I didn’t want to believe it was you, but I knew. I just knew. When I saw a dropper missing, I thought you were already gone. I didn’t want to believe you could betray us, that you could possibly do this. You should have died on that target planet. We both should have.”
Sabira groped for the words that would somehow, miraculously, make Daggeira understand. If those words existed, Sabira couldn’t capture them. She wished she could just take Daggs’s hand, kiss the corner of her lips, let her touch say all the things her words couldn’t. “I'm here for them. That’s my duty now.”
“Nameless cowards and blasphemers? Really? You would fight me for . . . them?” Daggeira gestured toward the grank casually with her palukai.
“I don’t want to fight. But if you make me . . . Daggs, no one else needs to die here. You could come with us. You could be free. Isn’t that better than killing each other?”
“Look at you. You can barely stand. You think you can fight me? You think I'm the one who will die here?”
“Please, don't do this. The Warseers are liars. The Masters are liars. It’s all lies. I can show you. Come with us. Come with me, and I’ll show you.”
“I heard you, you know. When you were talking to me back on the planet. But I didn’t want to believe it. I thought I must have dreamed it. But it’s true, isn’t it? The Stargazer I knew could never say those things.”
“Daggs, please. There’s so much . . . Just come with us. We can be free, together.”
“I can’t betray everything I believe in. I’m not like you.”
“I have a yarist gem,” said Sabira, touching the pocket with her free hand. She tried to stand taller, hold back her tired shoulders. Truthfully, she wished she could let go of the pretense and bravado. Fall into Daggs’s arms. Feel the electricity of her touch and know they would all be safe.
“You think that will help you? You couldn’t beat me at obezya, you couldn’t beat me when I invoked Conqueror, and you sure as grank shit can’t beat me now. Gem or not. I could take your head if I wanted and nothing this side of the Gates can stop me. I’d be promoted straight to caller. Maybe even first drum. I’d be covered in glyphs.”
“We can stop you,” said Zonte from atop the grank, aiming his palukai. “We could slag you right now.”
“Don’t even try to hurt Sabira,” warned Cal. “Our grank will stomp you dead, dead, dead.”
Sabira didn’t turn to look but gestured behind her for them to back down. A rapid succession of thudding booms shook the hangar. Sparks poured from above.
“Daggs, kill me or let us pass. But do it now. Otherwise, we're all going to die in this pyramid.”
Daggeira stared at her, left hand twitching as she gripped the palukai. “Even if I let you go, they'll come for you. The Warseers will hunt you across the galaxy.”
“Not where we’re going,” she said. “They’ll never find us.”
“And what about the Gods, can you hide from them? You'll never pass through the Gates now. Is freedom really worth that?”
“The Gods always demand a sacrifice, you were right about that,” said Sabira. “Whether it’s Warseers hunting me across the stars, or Gods exiling me from Heaven, if that’s my sacrifice so be it.
“But see me now, Daggeira. I see you. I see you like no God or Master ever could. Do you see me, too, here now, before you?”
“I see you, Stargazer. I always have.”
“Then believe me, this isn’t a trick. It’s not a game. We can escape the Unity forever. We can travel to the farthest end of the galaxy, together, free. Or we can die here now, together, for nothing. For nothing at all.”
47.
DYING, ONCE YOU got past the first horrified shock, always had an unreal quality to it, like slipping from one dream into the next, like stretching across a deep, silent blankness. In the pit, on the alien rooftop, under the sway of eon, each time death came for her it came cloaked in dream.
Dream or not, Sabira wasn’t letting go. Not yet, anyway. She willed her eyes open. Everything appeared doubled, blurry. They were in the dropper’s hold. The light strips were tuned to a dim glow. A handful of blurred forms were harnessed in around her. The incessant thrum of engines and wet rhythms of Dawn sobbing sounded oddly distant, muted.
The dropper’s only purpose was to transport weapons—servants and granks—planetside and back without getting obliterated in the process. It was little more than cargo holds and engines encased in a shell of heavy armor. The upper hold, wide enough to transport an entire task, consisted of human-sized harnesses, arranged to face each other across three open aisles. Three grank pens made up the lower hold. A cockpit designed for warseer pilots perched on top of the ship. Other than armor, engines, and guns, that was it. No stealth fields. Not even gravity or inertial generators. So every maneuver and thrust sent her internal organs tumbling over each other.
Blackness stalked the edges of her vision, threatened to sweep over and take her. Though her head felt like a broken slab of granite and free fall made her guts twirl up to her throat, she held on, refusing to let that other, internal gravity pull her down into the black.
Willing her eyes to focus, Sabira looked around the hold for the others—to remind herself, yes, Torque and Derev hadn’t been left behind, all her brood-family was here—and secretly hoped to see Daggeira sitting with them.
But Sabira saw her only in memories, slippery as dreams.
Memories of Daggeira in the hangar, staring with that ice-sharp glare of hers, the ache of betrayal showing through clear and unmistakable. Heartbreak and rage resonating in every word, every threat.
Daggeira choosing her own way, neither to fight nor join, but to leave.
Daggeira turning her back and disappearing inside one of the two remaining droppers. The ship disappearing behind the thick metal doors of the airlock.
Sabira tried to see herself through Daggeira’s eyes. Last she would have remembered was the two of them alone, bleeding,
desperate for every rasping breath, stranded on a hostile planet as the sky burned. Then coming out of a coma to find her crewmate saying and doing the most unimaginable, blasphemous things. And before any sense could be made of their situation, before Daggeira had any chance to understand and be liberated herself, scooped back up by the Unity. Only to have that implode around her, too. Of course, she wouldn’t come with Sabira. She could never have possibly understood what was happening to them. Sabira could barely understand it herself. Soon a galaxy would separate them, forever leaving them somewhere between sworn foes and lovers.
Stirred back to the present, Sabira heard the thick splash of someone getting sick and wasn’t entirely sure if it was her or somebody else.
“Hold on tight,” urged Orion’s disembodied voice. “It’s pretty glitchy out there. I had to move the Shishiguchi another few thousand clicks out. Good news is Gabriel and Ed are safe on board. I’ve got their transport on a return interce—”
Orion’s voice dissolved into fuzz, and the ship lurched violently. They spun ass-over-head more times than Sabira could count. She knew for certain that she was the one getting sick this time. The remaining bile burned the back of her throat.
The ship leveled out, though Sabira’s brain continued to somersault. The lurking blackness crept across her vision. She fought back. Refused to let it slip up and over her one last time—not yet—and spat out the sour bile still clinging to her throat.
Orion’s voice came back, spewing profanities in several languages. “Sabira, I can’t access the weapons array.”
“No automated weapons,” she slurred. “Against Will. Only manual. Main gunnery controls, cockpit. Secondary, crew hold.”
“Damn superstitious primitives,” he said. “Fine then. Who can man the guns?”
Even through the blur, she felt all the faces turn toward her. Of course. Who else? The yarist gem, she decided, it was the only way.
“I’ll do it,” said Cal. “Let me try.”
“Me, too,” offered Zonte.
Sabira wanted to thank them, then decided not to waste energy on speaking.
Orion said he found the interfaces for Cal’s and Zonte’s harnesses. With a buzzing and whirring, control panels opened next to the boys and rose up to be easily reached. Word by painstaking word, Sabira instructed them how to turn on the display. The empty space along the center of their aisle blossomed into light and color and information, a holo targeting display piped in from the ship’s sensors. She instructed them on what they saw. Ships tagged red where Unity. Ships tagged yellow were Monarchy. The concentric red and green triangles were for assigning target locks. Anything flashing orange and black was a missile target locked on them.
In the dead center of the display floated a white wedge of light indicating their ship. The rest of the holo tilted and swayed around its axis point. The purple-green curve of Dlamakuuz filled the bottom edge of the display. After the planet, the Zol-Ori loomed largest. Hundreds of multicolored fires bloomed from its hull, billowing out into vacuum. Swarms of wreckage twirled and scattered into clouds. Farther off, two more pyramids discharged a visual cacophony of missiles and heavy plasma bolts. Sabira couldn’t count all the Monarchy ships in the fray and more kept appearing in the holo every moment.
“I’m getting us out of here as fast as this brick can go,” said Orion. “Which isn’t very. Don’t shoot at anyone or anything unless it gets too close. We want to draw as little attention to ourselves as possible. Got it?”
“It’s blinking. It’s blinking,” shouted Cal and Zonte.
To Sabira, the holo had dissolved into a pond of suspended colors, lines of trajectories rippling across like waves. Even so, she could discern the orange and black flashes pulsing through the currents.
“Now that you can shoot,” said Orion.
Cal and Zonte frantically punched at the weapons controls. A flurry of holographic red lines sprung from the center wedge and arced toward the incoming missiles. Missed. The flashing orange and black grew steadily closer in the display. Orion announced the missiles were two thousand meters out.
“Be steady,” Sabira instructed, unsure if she spoke loud enough to be heard. “Focus. Line up the shot.”
Eighteen hundred. Their defensive fire missed again. The target locks were failing. If the Monarchy found a way to jam the Unity locks, those pyramids had little chance of victory. Or survival.
Sixteen hundred.
Fourteen hundred.
“Yes, yes, yes!” Orion shouted. “Get ’em, boy.”
A pulse of red light streaked into the holo display, stroked the vacuum a hundred meters out, and homed in on the incoming missiles. Must be the other dropper under Orion’s control.
Twelve hundred.
The red line slammed into the flashing orange and black holos and disintegrated into a fray of high energy particles.
Sabira hadn’t realized she had been holding her breath until she let it go. The tense squeezing in her chest melted away. The other drop ship had taken out the pursuing torpedoes. They were safe.
No, they weren’t. A flash of orange and black spat out from the debris cloud. One missile still locked on.
Nine hundred.
“Fire! Fire!” she croaked, unable to yell.
Cal and Zonte fired like mad, every barrage missing the target.
Seven hundred.
“Not where it is,” she rasped as loudly as she could, “where it will be.”
Five hundred.
Wails of terror echoed through the hull. Sabira didn’t know who was screaming. Maybe all of them. Orion piloted the shuttle into a wild, evasive spin. Her entire body felt sick, down to the bones.
Three hundred.
I chose this. If I die now for my choices, my freedom, so be it.
The ship lurched violently out of the spiral. Every fiber of bone and tissue in her body compressed itself into the harness. Like an entire Labyrinth caving in on her skull. The dull blackness, finally triumphant, flooded up from the edges of vision, instantaneously drowning out the fear, the panic, the screams, with the harsh numbness of oblivion.
Still not dead.
For someone who seemed fond of visiting, death apparently felt less inclined to stick around. Sabira knew she wasn’t dead because that’s exactly what the voices were shouting.
Something strange was happening with her insides. It took her a second to realize her kidneys weren’t floating up into her throat anymore. Gravity.
Hands were all over her, supporting, lifting, carrying away. Whispers through a fog told her to hold on, they made it. Told her she was safe. Sabira, quite certain that they all should be dead, wondered if perhaps this, at last, was death’s final dream.
A sharp sting in her neck sent electricity arcing down her spine, tingling in her fingers and toes. Her eyes snapped open. She lay in some kind of medical ward. Two faces lurked overhead, silhouetted by the ceiling lights.
“Sabira, can you see me? Are you hearing me alright?” asked the spiky-headed silhouette.
“Orion? Is that you?” she asked.
“Good. It’s working,” he said. “Don’t worry about a thing, Sabira. We’re going to get you up and causing trouble in no time. You are one of the biggest badasses I have ever met. You know that? And I have met some major badasses in this galaxy.”
“Are you trying to tell me I have a big ass?”
The other silhouette laughed wearily. “Orion’s colloquialisms don’t always translate well, do they?”
“The missile?” Sabira asked.
“The missile?” responded Orion. “No, no. Cal nailed that bastard, can you believe it? Eighty meters out.”
“Just rest,” said the other, larger silhouette. The voice, deep and resonating, could only be Gabriel’s. “You’re alive. You got them out alive. You can rest now.”
“Not all. I failed them. I failed—” Sabira broke off as the entire room suddenly twisted up and over.
Everything rattled. Fields of artificial gravity and inertia tugged, jerking them back and forth before equilibrium returned.
“Have they found us?” asked Gabriel. “Are we hit?”
“No,” said Orion offhandedly. “That wasn’t a missile hitting us, that was a shockwave. The Zol-Ori just blew. We got tossed for a moment, but our shields held. We’re fine.”
Gabriel knelt so his face was level with where Sabira lay. She could see him clearly now, the swelling, purple bruises, the crudely shaved scalp, the glint of his golden eyes.
“You didn’t fail Rain or Maia or anyone,” he said, softening his heavy voice. “We failed you. You warned us. You insisted, but we didn’t listen. We were—I was—too proud to listen. I thought I could keep us all safe. Their deaths are my failings, not yours Sabira. This disaster is my fault and mine alone. Without you, we’d all be dead or enslaved. Just rest now. Let Orion heal you up. You did it. You got them here safe. You can sleep now. Sleep as long as you need.”
Sabira wanted to argue, tell him no, make him understand that Rain and Maia died because of her. Because she hadn’t fought hard enough. Hadn’t struck fast enough. She had to let him know. But the heavy gravity in her core had returned, as irresistible as it was insistent. The alertness brought on by the zap to her neck waned, dropped away, revealing the deep black numbness that had been waiting there all along.
48.
THE SHISHIGUCHI ORBITED a blue gas giant on the far side of the Av system from Dlamakuuz. Orion had parked them out there after fleeing the battle, where they could wait and see who won.
They all collapsed from exhaustion for a few days, and the lems tended to their wounds. Ed was successfully treated for bioweapon and had the biomech respirator removed. Torque and Derev were given forma prosthetics. Orion-lem, with help from Coraz, surgically clean-cut their stumps to even out the wounds’ surfaces and expose all the nerves before attaching adapters that looked like thin, bronze caps over their stumps. Preprogrammed forma attached to the adapters and shaped itself into a forearm and hand for Torque, and a knee, leg, and foot for Derev. Unless Sabira looked intently, the difference between the original and prosthetic limbs was almost unnoticeable.
Before the Shattered Gates of Heaven Part 4: Sacrificial Altars (Shattered Gates Volume 1 Part 4) Page 6
