A TREMENDOUS NOISE like a giant egg cracking apart jolted Daggeira awake. Dreams still lingered at the edges of her mind—animals squealing, high-pitched screams—when everything around her suddenly convulsed and shuddered. Another violent shaking followed immediately after, jostling the dream echoes from her head and nearly throwing her out of the cot. Heart pounding, she willed her groggy mind to focus.
Where was she?
Right. Quarantine wing. Infirmary. Battleship Pyramid Zol-Ori.
Alone.
Light strips flickered and hissed overhead. Medtech stations rattled where they lay strewn about. Some brutal force had angled the floor up toward the ceiling while she slept, buckling the front wall and snapping the quarantine door in two. Its broken pieces hung at odd angles. That must’ve been the noise that jolted her awake.
She found a basic uniform folded beside her bed and yanked it on. Seemed to take forever just to pull on a pair of boots. Swaying up the slanted floor, she headed out. No one in the outside corridor, either. Its flat plane had been reshaped into a frozen ripple of cracked and undulated plating. No announcements issued from the intercom to explain what was happening or give instructions.
Sonorous booms rumbled through the infirmary and almost knocked her off her feet. Smoke billowed down the corridors. The overhead light strips sputtered out and the emergency lights came up—faint pink, bioluminescent strips outlining the corridor’s edges.
The explosions sounded like they came from the interior of the battleship pyramid, not the hull, which hopefully meant they weren’t under attack. Maybe there was some kind of weapons malfunction or a problem with the engines? She needed to get to the servants on the lower decks. Someone there would know what was happening. They would be able to tell her what to do.
Daggeira staggered down the corridor to the lifts, until a wall of mangled steel and super ceramic blocked the way. How in all the hells? Things were going from deep bad to godsdamned catastrophic.
She remembered that maintenance shafts connected the decks, but not where to find them. Coughing from the smoke, she investigated the dim passageways, opening every door she could. She quickly got lost in the unfamiliar corridors of the medical deck; stopped by dead ends and turned around by caved-in passages.
She finally found a sign pointing to the maintenance shafts when a massive thud rattled through the deck. She lost her balance and fell, smacking her head against the bulkhead. Dark stars danced in her vision. That last explosion came from the outer hull. If the Zol-Ori wasn’t under attack before, it sure as hell was now. She didn’t know how much time she had to find safety, but it was running out fast. Head still spinning, she pulled herself up and stumbled to the maintenance hatch.
That’s a shaft alright.
Daggeira didn’t know what she was expecting, but it should have been a narrow vertical tube with bright yellow rungs up and down its length, because that’s what she got. Blinking away dizziness and the sedative murk, she stepped onto the ladder and climbed down, rung by shaking rung. Conduits of biotubing and reflexor panels lined the walls. Halfway to the drummers deck, a reflexor popped and sizzled, spitting hot sparks over her bare scalp. Harsh fumes stung her eyes and nose. She wiped her face on her uniform sleeve and kept descending.
Daggeira spotted the door to the drummers deck and kicked it open. Smoke and vapors choked the air. The stench of biomech oils tasted acidic and rusty on the back of her tongue. She pulled her tunic over her nose and went in. Keeping low beneath the worst of the smoke, she searched the corridors and called out for others. No one answered. When she reached the center of the drummers deck, her mouth dropped open.
Somehow, impossibly, the Servants Hall was gone. The center of ritual life, wide enough to hold every soul aboard the pyramid, had been reduced to a ragged hole in the floor. Daggeira looked down through the rupture to where the granks were penned. The lower deck was intact, but she didn’t see any of the war beasts. The pens were piled with rubble and coated with grit. And bodies. Thousands of bodies. Human and Gohnzol-Lo alike. She gagged, acidic bile stinging her throat. Falling to her knees, she pulled her tunic below her chin and puked.
Daggeira had seen plenty of death and killing in her life, but nothing like that carnage.
She stood, wiping the filth from her lips, and looked away. Anywhere but down. The floors directly over the hall had also been ripped open. Billowing smoke clouded her view. From out of the smoke, heavy chunks of flaming debris fell from the upper command levels, down through the rent open floors, to crash onto the grank pens below. Rings of dust and grit puffed into the air.
Daggeira struggled to make sense of what she saw. For some reason, the granks must have stampeded as rites were being held in the Servants Hall. Some of the granks had flown up on their implanted hover pods. They might still be rampaging upward, tearing open the Zol-Ori from within, deck by deck. If the war beasts were still going up, she better keep moving down. At least the lower levels looked to be intact.
Daggeira found a discarded palukai rifle among the wreckage, where the tattered edge of the floor twisted up and over on itself. Weapon in hand, she headed back to the maintenance shafts and climbed down until she came to a dropship hangar adjacent to the pens.
Inside the hangar, bioluminescent sparks showered down from blown-out light strips, casting shadows into demonic dances across the bulkheads. Sirens blared dire warnings that they were under attack. The entire pyramid shuddered from missile fire detonating on the Zol-Ori’s hull. A chunk of ceiling crashed to the deck, splashing dust and embers into her face. Coughing, she wiped the grit from her eyes.
How under the rocks did this happen?
A trail of blood stained the floor, half-hidden by the settling chalk and ash, leading to the three dropship berths. One of the droppers was gone. Someone had made it off the Zol-Ori.
Two more droppers still waited in their berths. She had a way out.
If only she knew how to fly them.
Standing in the dead center of the dropship hangar, Daggeira mentally ran through each of the catastrophic disasters shattering her life in the past weeks. From the grank stampede they had almost caused on another pyramid; to the nine eyes branded across her back as punishment; to the disastrous infiltration mission on the target planet they now orbited, watching her crewmates killed one by one in front of her; to stumbling toward the brink of death herself, only to wake up surrounded by blasphemy and the traitorous unseen. And when she looked into the center of each disaster, the same face always stared back at her. Even if Daggeira didn’t know how this latest catastrophe had happened, she knew exactly who would be found at its beating heart.
A new, rhythmic thudding pulled Daggeira from her reverie. The heavy plodding steps of a war beast resounded over the rumbles and rattles of the dying battleship. A huge grank emerged from a cloud of toxic dust. Dark human and warseer blood stained its thick legs. Scorch marks and grit coated the biomech’s gray-black plating. Its four green, glowing eyes scanned her as it lumbered out of the tunnel connecting the hangar with the pens. Across its wide back and weapons platforms lay the escaped khvazol humans, staring at her with fearful eyes.
And on top of the war beast rode the catastrophic heart herself, Sabira Stargazer, locking eyes with Daggeira through the smog.
Because of course she is.
The grank stopped in front of her, close enough that Daggeira could reach out and touch its horned snout. Sabira crawled down its side and positioned herself between Daggeira and the grank. Sabira held a palukai of her own and leaned onto it like a staff, vainly trying to hold herself proud and erect. The wan, drained look from overuse of the yarist gem was obvious in Sabira’s every gesture. Plastered with more blood and grime than even the grank behind her, she looked as if she had just slaughtered the whole pyramid herself.
Perhaps she had. Perhaps Trickster’s seed truly had taken root in Sabira’s heart and ripened into something terrible.
“I was in the infirmary when . . .” Daggeira started. “I didn’t want to believe it was you, but I knew.” Death and chaos trail you like a shadow, Stargazer. “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.”
Daggeira’s eyes twitched, irritated by the fumes. “You should have died on that target planet. We both should have.”
“I’m not . . .” Sabira appeared so exhausted that even speech required too much of her. “I’m here for them, that’s my duty now.” She nodded toward the khvazol clinging to the biomech.
“Nameless cowards and blasphemers? Really? You would fight me for . . . them?” Daggeira gestured at the grimy unseen with her palukai.
Sabira pushed Daggeira’s stick aside. “I don’t want to fight you. But if you make me . . .”
There it was, that anger always just below the surface with Sabira. At least something recognizable remained within her.
“Daggs, no one else needs to die here,” Sabira said. “You could come with us. You could have freedom. Isn’t that better than us 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 thought I must have dreamed it. But it’s true, isn’t it? The Stargazer I knew could never . . .”
“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 thought I knew who you were, knew your heart. Was I so wrong?
“I have a yarist gem.” Sabira touched a bulging pocket with her free hand.
“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 grankshit can’t beat me now. Gem or not. I could take your head if I wanted, and nothing this side of the Gates could stop me. I’d be promoted straight to caller. Maybe even first drum. I’d be covered in glyphs.”
“We can stop you.” A pillow boy stood atop the grank, aiming a palukai at her. “We could slag you right now.”
The pillow was pretty, but clearly had no idea how to hold a palukai. Daggeira could blast the silly driller to ash and vapor before he squeezed the trigger.
“Don’t even try to hurt Sabira,” warned the mine rat with them. “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. Showers of hot 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’s left hand twitched as she gripped the palukai tighter. “Even if I let you go, they'll come for you. The Warseers will hunt you across the galaxy.”
“Not where we’re going.” Sabira shook her head. “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,” Sabira said. “Whether it’s Warseers hunting me across the stars, or the 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.”
I held you to me and kissed your scarred breast beneath the stars and the Shattered Gates of Heaven. Dancer’s holy sweat, I want to go with you. But it feels wrong. It is wrong.
“Maybe we should die here,” Daggeira said.
“It doesn’t need to be like this. I’m not . . .” Sabira pulled back her shoulders, lifted her chin. “I’ve changed, Daggs. Maybe the Sabira you knew really did die down there.”
“The Sabira I knew never could have slaughtered thousands of her own people.”
“I never wanted that to happen. We just wanted to get away. If there had been another way . . .”
“It really was you, then. Godsdamn.” Daggeira felt as though she saw Sabira for the first time. Even in betrayal, even with the blood of her fellow servants and warseers on her hands, she still thinks she’s righteous. She can’t see the monster she’s turned into.
“I prayed,” Daggeira said. “With every breath I could barely take on that rooftop, I prayed. Knew I was dying, but I begged Mother of Life to see you. Prayed for She Who Waits to take me if it meant She waited for you a little longer. And I swore that if the Gods somehow saw us both, then I would be Their truest Servant. Don’t you see? They heard my prayers. They saved us. You would still turn your back on Heaven now, after everything?”
“It wasn’t the Gods that saved our lives. It was them, my new brood.”
New brood? “No, Sabira, the Gods saved you, and it was you who saved me. I know what you did. Gave me your last air tank. I remember your breathers were almost finished. Could’ve kept the canister for yourself. Instead, you gave it to me, even though I was already almost . . .”
“Daggs.” Sabira held out her open hand to Daggeira, caked with dried blood, and her eyes pierced through her.
Daggeira had stared into those gorgeous eyes at the peaks of both bliss and dread, and she badly wanted to give in to them. Something was different though, as if they were the same eyes, but someone new stared through them. She turned away from Sabira’s outstretched hand and uncanny gaze.
“I can’t betray our Gods,” Daggeira said. “I can’t betray you, either.”
And that, Daggeira realized, was all she had to say. Without another word, she turned her back on Sabira and her new brood of traitors and walked to one of the remaining dropships.