ALONE AGAIN, DAGGEIRA scaled up the side of the dropper. She pulled open the outer port of the command cockpit and stopped frozen, overwhelmed by the rows of interfaces and biomech reflexors within. She had gone through basic piloting disciplines, like any servant assigned to an infiltration crew, but she was just an unranked skin. The advanced piloting disciplines were for ranks only. She had little-to-no idea what anything did. At least when she had turned her back on Sabira, she had managed to close the hangar doors on the first try.
You’re better off surviving on your own, she assured herself. Always have been.
Daggeira closed the port behind her and climbed into one of the three seats designed for Gohnzol-Lo Warseers. Within its oversized contours, she felt like a mine rat again. The primary controls were barely within reach. The pilot’s harness was looser than preferred, but she managed to tighten it enough so she wouldn’t float free after leaving the pyramid’s gravity field. She found a nearby strap to tie down her palukai stick.
Scanning the complex interfaces, a few stood out as familiar, and she tested triggering each. With a sigh of relief, the cockpit’s bioluminescent light strips faded on. A holo projection surrounded her with the visual input of the dropship’s sensors. Directly ahead, as seen through the holo, the bay’s outer doors jerked open. Fiery, chaotic destruction raged outside, outshining the milky glare of the local cluster’s crowded stars. Launching the dropper into the losing side of a space battle would mean almost certain death. Not launching, and getting blown up along with the pyramid, would remove all doubts.
“Conqueror see me,” she whispered. “Mother of Life, you’ve shown me Your mercy so far. Please see me still.”
Daggeira triggered the ignition sequence and blasted into space. The void churned with stellar-bright webs of plasma fire and the streaking tails of missile barrages. Thank Star Father, the Monarchy forces didn’t appear concerned with targeting a single small ship. Not yet, at least. Daggeira knew little more than how to turn the lights on and ignite the engines. Maneuvering through an active space battle was beyond her capabilities. All she could do was watch.
Enemy Vleez warships filled the holo as bright, hexagonal diamonds unleashing a torrent of missiles at the Zol-Ori. Below, the ringed Vleez homeworld turned from day into night, leaving only a green-and-purple crescent against the black. Farther off, another Unity battleship pyramid, holo-identified as the Ihvik-Ri, and a swarm of smaller attack ships, unleashed a cascade of massive plasma bolts on the Monarchy forces. Standing sentinel at polar opposites of the battle, the clear, bright sun of the target system and the bloody smear of the Shattered Gates nebula.
She needed to get to the Ihvik-Ri but had no idea how. The pyramid where she’d been stationed before the attack on the target planet may not be any safer, but it was home.
Behind her, another dropper burst from the Zol-Ori—Sabira and her new brood. Immediately, the second dropper spiraled around a wave of enemy missiles and arced toward open space, away from the battle. How under the rocks could Sabira fly like that?
Should I do the same? Fly as straight and fast as I can, and leave this madness and death behind? Let the stars choose my fate?
It didn’t take the stars to make Daggeira realize what her fate would be. Droppers were made to shuttle servants and granks from pyramid to landfall and back, not extended journeys into deep space. Didn’t even have artificial gravity. Without an aku-vayk engine to travel faster than light, she’d freeze or starve before making it as far as the target planet’s nearest moon.
All those stars, and none of them for me.
The clamor of metal striking metal came from below. Daggeira hadn’t come up through the crew hold. If someone else had made it on board, perhaps they could pilot the ship. If it was a warseer, though, would they label her a deserter? Save her life only to redeem it within the clutches of a sacrificial altar? Could also be one of Sabira’s treacherous brood. The pretty pillow who thought he could fire a stick like a disciplined servant, perhaps he had come to claim some kind of misguided heroism.
Nothing more she could do in the cockpit anyway. Better to find out who was down there, and what they intended, sooner rather than later. Daggeira released the harness, freed her palukai from the strap, and took the small lift down to the next deck.
The lift doors slid open to reveal the dimly lit servants’ hold. Two rows of human-sized harnesses, enough to transport a task of twenty-seven servants, formed three aisles down the length of the hold. She could see down the middle aisle, but the left and right were dark and blocked from view. A muffled wheezing came from the aisle to her left.
She called out, “If you followed me looking for a fight, I’m right here.”
Another muffled wheeze was the only reply.
Daggeira pushed off with the slightest twitch of her ankle and floated forward. After stopping her momentum with a harness, a nearby movement caught her attention. Something floated lazily through the air. From starboard aft, small blobs drifted under the dim light strips. The blobs were fluid, red as . . . blood.
Less worried about an ambush, yet still keeping her palukai ready, Daggeira pushed herself to her left and peered down the starboard aisle. A bloody mess of a man hovered at the back, low to the deck, face down with one leg crudely tangled in a harness strap. A medic kit rotated weightlessly beside him. The wheezing sound was his slow, wet breathing.
She launched toward him, still keeping the stick ready just in case, and grabbed another harness to stop about a meter away. “You look like hammered grankshit.”
When he didn’t respond, she reached out with her palukai, wedged it under his shoulder, and rotated him over. The moment his grimy, blood-splattered face turned into view she gasped and let go of her stick. Grabbing a handful of his bloodstained uniform, she pulled the two of them together. A mound of red, inflamed flesh encased his right eye. His left eye, biomech silver, slowly blinked and twitched. A few teeth were missing behind swollen lips. The worst wound, however, was his left hand. He had it wrapped in a wet, soiled tunic. Red globules pulsed from the soaked-through cloth and hovered, quivering in the air.
“Don’t worry, Attendant Spear, I got you.” She caught the spinning med kit and pried it open.
“Sabira?” He asked for his blood-granddaughter, then coughed and spat something thick and viscous from his mouth.
“No, Attendant, it’s me, Daggeira.” She quickly scanned through the kit. Cannon had been the crew’s medic; he would have known instantly what to do. If his face hadn’t been melted off by the drilling infidels.
“Sabira . . . Must . . . Sabira . . .” Spear reached out his bloody, bandaged hand.
Sabira, Sabira, Sabira, always Sabira. Even now.
Growing up in the aggie caverns of Nahgohn-Za, Daggeira had tended to many wounded and sick animals, and in the Servants, she had been disciplined on the basics of battlefield first aid. She bandaged Attendant Spear’s hand and stanched the blood flow from the stumps of three severed fingers. She had just placed the stinger to his neck to inject him with painkillers and antibiotics when the speaker membranes throughout the ship came to life with a shrieking hiss.
The hiss ended and Gohnzol-Lo Warseer’s voice urgently called from the speakers in the high language. “All ships of the Holy Unity, fall back to the Pyramid Ihvik-Ri. You have nine hundred seconds to comply. Otherwise, regroup at rendezvous point seven-dash-seven. This is a command for full withdrawal. Repeating. All ships of the Holy Unity…”
Chewing on her bottom lip, Daggeira quickly dug through the med kit again, looking for a stimulant. Though it felt like it took forever, she found the right stinger. The old man spasmed and gasped soon after the injection.
A fit of deep, wet coughs racked through him and would have sent him tumbling if his leg wasn’t snagged in the harness. He coughed up a thick, moist glob of crimson before he finally stilled himself. His biomech eye darted around as he appeared to get his bearings. All the while, the transmitted command to withdraw counted down the remaining seconds.
“Attendant, can you hear me?”
He craned his neck toward her. “I hear you, servant. But you’re . . . my vision is blurry. Where are we?”
“In a dropper a few kilometers out from the Zol-Ori,” she said. “Just the two of us.”
“And we need to get the Ihvik-Ri before they leave without us,” he said.
“We do. But like I was saying, it’s just us. No pilot.”
“Wait.” He twisted his head stiffly back and forth, looking for something. “Sabira. Where’s Sabira? Have you seen her?”
Daggeira ground her teeth before forcing her mouth open to speak. “I’m sorry, Attendant. I don’t know where Sabira is.”
“We have to find her.”
“We have orders, Attendant. We have to return to the Ihvik-Ri. Not that it makes a difference either way.”
“No,” he said quietly. “No, you’re right. We go to the pyramid.”
“But Attendant, see me now. There’s no drilling pilot.”
He smiled as much as his swollen and bruised face could allow, revealing dark gaps of missing teeth. “Now, you see me. We never stop. Never. And whatever happens next, live or die, we face it together. Just drag me up to the cockpit . . . and pray Conqueror sees us one more time.”