I look to the Blues at their station. Most were here when I took this ship. When I renamed her. They became pirates with Orion, rebels with me. “You all heard him,” I say. “Well done. You did the Pax proud. Now say goodbye, get to your shuttle, and I’ll see you soon. There’s no shame in this.” They salute and Captain Pelus opens the hatches in the bottom of the pit. The Blues begin their slide down the narrow shaft into the berth where there should be escape pods, but we replaced with heavily armored shuttles. My own escape pod is built into the side of the bridge. But Victra and I aren’t escaping. Not today.
“Time to go, baby boy,” Victra says. “Now.”
I pat the doorframe of the bridge. “Thank you, Pax. ” I say to the ship. One more friend lost to the cause. I follow Victra and the marines in a sprint down the empty halls. Red lights pulse. Sirens wail. Small thumps reverberate through the hull as we go. Roque’s leechCraft will be swarming the Pax by now . Melting holes through her sides and pumping in boarding parties of Grays and Obsidians led by Gold knights. Instead of me, they’ll find an abandoned ship. A molten circle throbs on the hallway wall beside a gravLift as we board. I watch the orange deepen till it is the color of the sun. The drums still beat through the speakers. Thump. Thump. Thump.
Victra leaves a mine behind as a present for the boarding party.
We hear it detonate ten levels above us as the gravLift deposits us on level negative three in the auxiliary hangar. Here my true assault force waits. Thirty heavy assault shuttles with their ramps down. Blues performing flight checks in the cockpits. Orange mechanics working furiously to prime engines, fill fuel tanks. Each ship is filled with a hundred Valkyrie in full smart armor. Reds and Grays accompany them in equal number for special weapons tasks. The Obsidians stomp their pulseAxes and razors as I run past, a thunderous chanting of my name. I find Holiday in the center of the hangar standing with Sefi and a coterie of Valkyrie who will be my personal squad. With them, praying in a small group, are the Helldivers I requested from Dancer. They’re less than half the size of the Obsidians.
“Ship is breached,” I say to Holiday. She jerks her head at a squad of Reds, who rush off to cover our back. “Distance is less than a click.”
“No…” Holiday says with an elated laugh. “That close?”
“I know,” I reply excitedly. “They want to get close so we can’t shoot down their leechCraft.”
“So now we give them a kiss,” Victra says with a little purr for Holiday. “And some tongue.”
Holiday bobs her cinderblock head up and down. “Then let’s stop jawin’.”
Sefi pulls a handful of dried mushrooms from a satchel. “God’s bread?” she asks. “You will see dragons.”
“War’s scary enough, darling,” Victra says. Then as an aside: “I one time tripped on that shit with Cassius for a week on the Thermic.” She catches my look. “Well, it was before I met you. And have you ever seen him with his shirt off? Don’t tell Sevro, by the way.”
Holiday and I abstain from the mushrooms as well. Automatic weapons fire rattles from a hall just beyond the hangar. “The hour is here!” I boom to the three thousand Obsidian in the assault shuttles. “Sharpen your axes! Remember your training! Hyrg la, Ragnar!”
“ Hyrg la, Ragnar!” they roar.
It means “Ragnar lives.” The Queen of the Valkyrie salutes her razor to me and begins the Obsidian war chant. It spread through the black armored assault craft. A horrible dread sound, this time it is on my side. I’ve brought the Valkyrie to the heavens, and now I let them loose.
“Victra, you prime?” I ask, worried about Antonia being so near. Is my friend distracted by her sister?
“I’m gorydamn splendid, baby boy,” the tall woman says. “Take care of that pretty little ass of yours.” She slaps my butt before backpedalling, blowing me an obnoxious kiss and jogging to her shuttle. “I’ll be right behind.” I’m left with the Helldivers. They’re smoking burners, watching me with evil red eyes.
“First one through gets the bloodydamn laurel,” I say. “Helmets on.”
Little needs to be said to such men. They nod their heads and grin. We depart. I fly thirty meters upward on my gravBoots to land atop of one of the four clawDrills we confiscated from the platinum mining company in the inner asteroid belt. They stand in a row on the hangar deck, each fifty meters apart. Like grasping hands, the cockpit where elbow would be, the dozen drill bits on the deck where fingers would reach. Each is retrofitted by Rollo to have thrusters on the back and thick plates of armor extend down the sides. I slide into the cockpit, enlarged for my frame and armor, and slip my hands into the digital control prism.
“Fire them up,” I say. A familiar thrum of energy goes through the drill, vibrating the glass around me. I grin like a madman. Perhaps I am one. But I knew I could not win this battle without altering the paradigm. And I knew Roque would never be driven into a trap or lured into an asteroid belt, for fear of exposing his larger force to ambushes. So I had only one recourse: hide my ambush in a flaw of character. He always preached for me to step back, to find peace. Of course he thought he knew how to beat me. But I’m not fighting as the man he knew today, as a Gold.
I’m a bloodydamn Helldiver with an army of giant, mildly psychotic women behind me and a fleet of state-of-the-art warships crewed by pissed-off pirates, engineers, techs, and former slaves. And he thinks he knows how to fight me? I laugh as the clawDrill shakes my seat. Filling me with a dormant, crazed sort of power. An enemy boarding party breaches the hangar from the same gravLift we took. They stare up at the huge claw drills and evaporate as Victra’s shuttle fires a railgun at them from point-blank range.
“Remember the words of our Golden leader,” I say to the Helldivers. “Sacrifice. Obedience. Prosperity. These are the better parts of humanity.”
“Bloodydamn slag,” one says over the com. “I’ll show her the better part of my humanity.”
“Drills hot,” I order. They echo confirmation one by one. “Helmets up. Let’s burn.”
I flip the rotation toggle on my clawDrill clockwise. Beneath, the drill whirs. I plunge both hands forward in the control prism. Existence shakes. Teeth rattle. The metal deck sags under me. Molten metal peels back. I lurch ten meters down into the ship. Carving through the deck in five seconds. And the one after that. I sink again, falling through the floor of the hangar bay completely. Chewed metal around the cockpit. Then the next deck goes. Then the next. Heat builds along the drill as I slam through more of the ship, leaving the Valkyrie behind. Slow, the drill jams, slow and you die. And this speed is the pulse of my people. Momentum flowing into more momentum.
My clawDrill is building up a hell of a pace. Slamming through decks. Murdering metal with molten tungsten carbide teeth. I glimpse fractured sights of the other clawdrills ripping through the heart of the ship as we fall through the dimly lit barracks. Each drill glowing with heat and then slamming into the next deck. It is a glorious, horrible sight. Going through a mess hall. Through a water tank, then a hallway where a boarding party stumbles back from the debris and stares at the megalithic drills carving through the ship like the molten hands of some hilarious metal god.
“Don’t slow,” I roar, entire body convulsing in the seat. I’m out of control, going too fast, drill too hot. Then…nothing. I breach the belly of the Pax. Silence of space grips me. Weightless. I float like a spear through water toward the huge Colossus. LeechCraft bound for the Pax streak past me, one close enough I can see the captain’s wide eyes inside the cockpit. Another flies straight into my superheated drill’s mouth. Shredded in seconds. Men and debris cartwheel to the side. The other drills exit farther down the Pax ’s belly, bursting into space, diving for the MoonBreaker. Around us, the battle rages. Blue explosions, huge fields of flak. Mustang’s group racing along the edge of Roque’s formations, exchanging punishing broadsides. Sevro still waits, hiding.
I can feel the confusion in the enemy gunners. I’m in the center of their leechCraft assault teams. They can’t fire. Their computers won’t even register the vessel classification. It’ll look like a hunk of debris shaped like an arm from the elbow down. I doubt the bridge will even know what it is without seeing it with their naked eye.
“Blast engines,” I say. The engines of the retrofitted clawDrill kick behind me and hurl me down at the black surface of the Colossus. Recognizing my threat, a ripWing sprays me with chain gun rounds. Thumb-sized bullets slam silently into the drill. The armor holds. Not so on the clawDrill beside mine. When a railgun round fired from a five-meter gun along the top-crest of the MoonBreaker punches through the cockpit, murdering the Helldiver in it, his ship shatters. One of his drillbits slams into my glass cockpit, cracking it. A dozen more rounds shred the leechCraft beside me. Roque might not know what the 30 meter projectiles coming from my ship are, but he’s willing to kill his own men to stop their approach.
Gray metal blurs toward me. A railgun slug fired from the Colossus punches through three leechCraft in front of my ship before striking the bottom of my clawDrill, at the “wrist.” It tears up the length of the drill, erupts up through the floor of my cockpit, between my legs, inches from my balls, scraping along my chest, almost taking my head off at the jaw. I jerk back and the slug slams into the metal support of the cockpit. Shattering the glass and bending the bar outward like a melting plastic straw. I gasp, knocked half unconscious by the kinetic energy transference.
White spots flash across my vision.
I shake myself. Trying to bring my senses back.
I’ve spun off course. This rig isn’t meant for steering. About to slam into the MoonBreaker’s deck. Instinct doesn’t save me. My friends do. The clawDrill’s engines are slaved to the bank of Blues back on Orion’s ship. Someone reverses the thrusters at the last moment so I don’t crash. I’m slammed back in my seat as the clawDrill slows and then lands gently onto the surface of the Colossus. I jerk in my seat, laughing in fear .
“Bloodydamn” I whoop to my distant saviors, whoever they are. “Thank you!”
But the clawDrill itself is all manual. Blues can’t operate the digits any better than I can plot slingshots around a planet. My hands dance over the controls, flowing into my old mode of labor. I reactivate the drill, using my engines to push me down like a nail into the surface of the ship. Metal wheezes. Bolts rattle. And I begin to gnaw through the top layer of armor, which they said no leechCraft could penetrate.
Pressure hisses out around my drill. I ramp up the revolutions, my hands dancing through the controls, shifting the drill bits as they overheat, cycling through cooled units. Space disappears. I burrow into the warship. Carving not in a straight line, but a tunnel toward the front of the ship. One deck. Two decks. Chewing through halls and barracks and generators and gas lines. It’s hideous and as savage a thing as I’ve ever done. I just pray I don’t hit a munitions store. Men and women and debris fly out into space through the hole I’ve carved like autumn leaves sucked from the various deck levels I penetrate. Bulkheads will seal off the wound, but those caught between the bulkheads and the tunnel are good as dead.
Three hundred meters into the ship, my clawDrill breaks down. Drill bits spent and engine overheating. I reach down to pop my cockpit canopy to abandon the drill, but my hand slips on the lever. Blood coats it. I search my body frantically. But my armor isn’t punctured. The blood isn’t from me. It floats off the right cockpit wall, slick around the round railgun slug that pierced the three leechCraft to imbed itself in the support beam of my clawDrill. Bits of hair and a fragment of bone clump in the clotting blood.
I leave my clawDrill behind for the vacuum of the tunnel I carved. Air no longer gushing from the ship. It’s calm now, the pressure already vented and the emergency bulkheads closed to quarantine the compromised hull. The gravity generator in this section of the ship must have been hit. My hair floats in my helmet.
I look up. At the end of the tunnel, where I penetrated the hull, is a little keyhole to the stars. A dead man drifts just beyond it, slowly spiraling. A shadow grips him as Antonia’s flagship passes beyond, blocking the light reflected from Jupiter’s surface. Like the man, I’m left in darkness. Alone in the belly of the Colossus. My com a flood of war-chatter. Victra is launching from our hangar. Orion and the Moon Lords are in flight, knocked off the poles of Io and bound for Jupiter. Mustang’s flagship is now under assault by Roque’s ship as Antonia leads the rest of his fleet after the retreating Telemanuses and Raas.
Still, Sevro waits.
Thirty meters above me, something moves out from one of the levels I carved through, peering into the twenty-meter-wide tunnel. My helmet identifies an active weapon. I fly upward, activating my pulseShield as I go only to find a young Gray staring at me through the plastic faceplate of an emergency oxygen mask. He floats, one arm holding a ragged length of metal wall. Blood coats him. Not his own. The body of one of his friends floats behind him. He’s shaking. My drill must have gone through his entire platoon, and then space pulled their bodies out, leaving him alone here. The terror of me is reflected in his eyes. He raises his scorcher and I react without thinking. Putting my razor into the side of his heart, I make him a carcass. He dies wide-eyed and young and he floats there, upright till I put my foot on his chest so I can pull my blade out. We drift away from each other. Little droplets of blood dancing off my blade in the zero gravity.
Then the gravity generators reboot and my feet clomp to the floor. The blood splatters over them. His body flops to the ground. Light floods in behind me from the tunnel shaft. I pull myself away from the dead man and peer up into the tunnel to see a shuttle ripping in out of space. More follow. A whole cavalcade of assault craft led by Victra. RipWings chase them, but mounted guns on the back of the assault craft spray high-energy fist-sized rounds at them. Shredding the ripWings. More will come. Hundreds more. We must move fast. Speed and aggression our only advantage here.
Victra’s transport slows dramatically in the tunnel beyond my level, just above the clawDrill. Valkyrie pour out to join me. More transports unload on levels above. Holiday and several Reds with battle armor move with the Obsidians, carrying breaching equipment across the airless room toward the bulkhead door that seals us off from the rest of the ship. They slam the thermal drill onto the metal. It begins glowing red. They deploy a pulseBubble over the metal hatch so that when we breach, we don’t activate more bulkheads.
“Breach green in fifteen,” Holiday says.
Victra stands to the side listening to enemy chatter. “Response teams inbound. More than two thousand mixed units.” She’s also patched to the strategic command on Orion’s ship, so she can gather battle data from the huge sensor arrays on the flagship. Looks like Roque launched more than fifteen thousand men at us in his leechCraft. Most will be in the Pax by now. Burrowed through to find me. Silly bastards. Roque gambled big, bet wrong. And I’ve just brought three thousand crazed Obsidian berserkers to a mostly empty warship.
The Poet is going to be pissed.
“Ten,” Holiday says.
“Valkyrie, on me,” I boom, lifting my hands in a triangle formation.
The hundred Obsidians step over the debris of the commissary and gather behind me, just as we trained them to do on the journey from Jupiter. Sefi’s on my left hip, Victra’s on my right and Holiday behind. The superheated metal door sags. The Reds and Grays back away. All along the tunnel on the ten levels I carved through, teams like this will be preparing to breach just like us. Two of the other clawDrills hit home. Two thousand Obsidians are breaching there as well. Grays, Reds, and a scattering of sympathizer Golds will lead them against the security forces who take trams and gravLifts to ferry themselves to the new battlefront inside the ship.
This is going to be a firestorm. Close quarters combat. Smoke. Screams. The worst of war.
“Full power to shields,” I say in Nagal, facing the Valkyrie. They ripple iridescent as shields play over their armor. “Kill anything with a weapon. Harm nothing without one. Doesn’t matter the Color. Remember our target. Clear me a path. Hyrg la, Ragnar!”
“ Hyrg la, Ragnar!” they roar, beating their chests, embracing the madness of war. Most will have taken their beserker fungus in the shuttlecraft. They’ll feel no pain. They move foot-to-foot, eager for the succor of battle. Victra vibrates next to me. I remember sitting with her in Mickey’s lab as she told me how she loves the smell of battle. The old sweat in the gloves. The oil on the guns. The pulled muscles and shaking hands afterward. It’s the honesty of it, I realize. That’s what she loves. Battle never lies.
“Victra, stay at my side,” I say. “Pair up for the Hydra if we encounter Golds.”
“Njar la tagag…” Sefi says from behind me.
“…syn tjr rjyka!”
“There is no pain. Only joy,” they chant, deep in the embrace of the god’s bread. Sefi begins the war bellow. Her voice higher than Ragnar’s. Her two wing-sisters join her. Then their wing-sisters, until dozens fill the com with their song, giving me a sense of grandeur as my mind tells my body to flee. This is why the Obsidians chant. Not to sow terror. But to feel brave, to feel kinship, instead of isolation and fear.
Sweat drips down my spine.
Fear is not real.
Holiday deactivates her safety.
“Njar la tagag…”
My razor goes rigid.
PulseWeapon shudders and whines, priming.
Body trembles. Mouth full of ashes. Wear the mask. Hide the man. Feel nothing. See everything. Move and kill. Move and kill. I am not a man. They are not men.
The chanting swells…. “Syn tjr rjyka!”
Fear is not real.
If you’re watching, Eo, it’s time to close your eyes.
The Reaper has come. And he’s brought hell with him.