THIS IS OUTRAGEOUS!” Pinnacle Bohru Jerik yelled. “Watch your words carefully, Lonno, or I will have you dragged before the Nahgak-Ri for blasphemy.”
“You are as deaf as you are blind,” High Godseer Atu Madzo jeered. “But not I. Can you not see what is right in front of your own three eyes? The Shattered Gates are open! The Gods are calling us to Heaven! Calling me. Let the vermin have their pitiful rocks for now. With this weapon, I will lead a host through the Gates of Heaven and unite all the galaxy under Divine Will!”
“You’ve gone mad.”
We need to go, Subaru insisted. Now.
Before she realized it, her hands pulled away from the alcove walls. The tendrils recoiled back into the abomination’s exoskeleton, and she saw through her own—Zika’s—eyes again. The abomination sprang forward, running through the curved passageways with heavy, clanging steps.
Had the High Godseer indeed gone mad? Why go through the Gates now, when Godsfall could finally conquer the Monarchy, after all these centuries? It made no sense to leave through the Gates before the entire local cluster had been conquered. Were the Final Masters pulling at the strings of ahns mind, using the High Godseer to seek out the Gods? Influencing ahn to unknowingly wreak their long-awaited vengeance?
Abomination Zika ascended to the upper tier while Daggeira was lost in thought. They came out of the passage and viewed the heart cavity from a higher balcony than the Pinnacle. Through Zika’s eyes, Daggeira saw her own face, ashen and slack, colored a sickly green from the glowing glyphs on the holy ore pyramid. Faint spectral auras shimmered around her head tattoos.
A wail of shocked terror drew her attention to the lowest tier of balconies.
Chosen Altaro’s head rolled down the curved slope of the cavity wall, followed by streams of blood and the ungainly tumble of ahns body. Chosen Scripturo’s shrill cry was silenced soon after by ahns own decapitation, before ahn slid down to join ahns comrade. Attendant Bolta stepped out of the shadowy corridor and twirled her palukai blade clean of bloody residue. The red splatter on her face and armor would not be cleansed so quickly. Chosen Chanto quivered prostate at her feet, begging for ahns life.
“This weapon is mine!” the Pinnacle shouted. “Your insurrection is over.”
The High Godseer held out ahns fat-fingered hands and laughed. “Are you not ever the blind Gohnzol-Lo, stumbling in the dark? Poor, foolish Dzor, you bring humans and sticks to contend with the powers of Gods and Masters!”
Harsh yellow light burst through the heart cavity. Daggeira winced away. When she could look again, Bolta and the two warseer escorts hung limp and motionless in the open air, suspended in blue-green snare fields projected from flying drones. She couldn’t find the Pinnacle anywhere.
Bohru Jerik’s voice boomed angrily from the corridor behind his balcony. “Trickster take you! How dare you commit such treason?”
He stepped out onto the overlook again, entirely cocooned in a quivering armor that undulated forth from his chest plate. He drew a heavy pistol. Before he could fire, the drones dove toward him, blasting flashes of angry yellow. Dazzles of color and heat flared but didn’t penetrate his armor. The undulations extended out from his body, forming a shield bubble around him of biomech insectoids. Armor beetles. The shrill whine of hundreds of biomechanical wings rose in pitch as the armor beetles swarmed protectively about the Pinnacle.
More drones buzzed into the cavity through open balconies and bombarded him with energy blasts that flared against the undulating shell of armor. Strobing bursts of yellow and green splashed the cavity walls.
Bohru Jerik persevered through the attack, for now. It was just a matter of time and attrition before his biomech defenses were broken. Overwhelmed by the drone onslaught, the Pinnacle couldn’t get a clean shot at the High Godseer. He fired wildly, scorching the walls and floating sarcophagi with streaks of black.
“This is our chance,” Daggeira said. “It’s a long jump, but this body can make it. When I get these hands on ahn, the High Godseer is dead meat.” The briefest twinge of shock and shame followed the thought of slaying the High Godseer. But the Pinnacle had declared ahn a traitor. It was no sin to crush a traitor.
She stepped back into the passage encircling the upper tier of the cavity, then darted forward and jumped from the balcony lip. At the last moment, her legs pinioned beneath her, shifting her trajectory. Instead of leaping across toward Atu Madzo’s hover platform, she arced down toward Bohru Jerik’s overlook.
The impact of the heavy abomination body, combined with the drones’ relentless energy attacks, finally overwhelmed Bohru Jerik’s shield bubble, scattering the biomech armor beetles. The hard machinery of her legs smashed Bohru Jerik’s head and chest. One of his horns sliced a long gash up Abomination Zika’s left leg, but Daggeira felt no pain. She barely even registered the wet crunch of his skull. The overlook shuddered from the impact. Dark green warseer blood splashed over purple crystal. Beetles dropped from the air and from his limbs. Those that survived, skittered away. The Pinnacle’s body jerked and spasmed, then stilled beneath her. The two guardian warseers looked on, suspended and helpless in their snare fields.
“No,” she whispered. “Subaru, you monster. No.”
The High Godseer’s meaty, hollow cackle echoed triumphantly through the heart cavity.
Daggeira staggered back into the passage, leaving a trail of green gore. The echoes of the High Godseer’s hideous laughter followed her into the shadows.
“What did you do?” she muttered. “What did you drilling do?”
Simply what needed doing.
“I’ll never have my body back. I’ve . . . I’ve lost . . . because of you. Lost everything.”
I know you can’t see it now—
“Damn you. We could have won the war. I could have won the war. All the Holy Unity would have finally seen me.”
Dear, I’m quite sorry, but no. You would have been a puppet for the Pinnacle’s glory. Nothing more. A puppet dripping with the blood of billions due to a pointless genocide.
“But they’re vermin. They have no place under Will.”
Subaru’s silence bore down on her with the heavy weight of disapproval. For the first time, Daggeira felt a glimmer of recognition of the horror that wiping out an entire sentient species entailed.
Crystalline tendrils extruded from the exoskeleton to seal her leg wound as she returned to the alcove. Trapped within this monstrosity of a body, within a mind that was not entirely her own, the alcove at least gave some primal sense of security. In there, an attack could only come straight on. But that wasn’t true. Through Subaru, she understood the nature of the crystal. It was a type of smart-matter and could be rewritten into almost any form. Every surface could come alive at any moment, directed by the High Godseer or the subconscious reflexes of the Final Masters. Nowhere inside Godsfall was safe.
And she wasn’t only at risk from the outer world. Her inner world was a battlefield of hidden traps and restraints and attacks. Since her transfiguration, Zika’s will had some dominion over her actions. But that control had come from outside of herself, even if it was disguised as her own reflexes. Now, uncertain which thoughts were her own and which were Subaru’s, she suspected every instinct of treachery, every impulse of hiding secret motives and snares.
So even if the alcove provided nothing more than an illusion of safety, it was an illusion she needed.
“I thought . . . I thought you said you wouldn’t take over my mind.”
I did say so, and I have not. A gestalt of different minds is forbidden.
“But you controlled my actions.”
I controlled the actions of this body. My mind is synced to it just as yours is.
“Get me out of here. Her flesh . . . this flesh is a cage.”
We need help, Subaru whispered through her terror.
Star Father’s balls, if that wasn’t the truth.
We can’t defeat the High Godseer with the resources we have. Not on this side of the Gates. But on the other side . . .
“No.”
We need my son, Orion. The High Godseer already wants to go where he is. If the Pinnacle took over, we’d never get to him. You’d never get your body back. Now, Orion appears to be aligned with that other young woman—
“Not her.”
Who else in all the universe do you think we can go to for help?
“Not. Her.”
Fine, but we do need my son. The High Godseer is going to consolidate ahns power immediately. There will surely be some resistance in that battleship’s ranks. But resistance or not, Atu Madzo will eventually assume control. Once established, Godsfall will lead an attack fleet through the Gates to my part of the galaxy. What happens after that will be awful, yet nothing compared to the horrors the Pinnacle would wreak if he took control of this weapon. We need to take control of Godsfall as quickly as we can, and for that, we need my son.
She didn’t want to see the logic, but she couldn’t ignore it. If Subaru said he could only get her body back with help from his son, even if he was with her, then she had no choice but to believe him.
“Next time, tell me first. Don’t just take control of my body like that.”
Hey. It’s my body, too.