The opening on the side of the moth was, Niko was relieved to note, nothing like a waste sphincter. It was vast enough that their tiny ship was just a blip within the immense ring that could have swallowed up a ship five hundred times the size of their shuttle.
She looked over her comrades. Milly and Atlanta stood at the ready, both with helmets down. Milly’s attention was on Niko and Niko nodded at her. Atlanta was at one of the windows, watching the approaching debris. Jezli and Roxana stood prepared as well; Jezli with her attention on Niko in that attitude of maddening politeness and Roxana watching beside Atlanta.
One of Gnarl’s crew, a lean knife blade of a humanoid, was piloting the shuttle. Gnarl and the other were across the chamber, watching Jezli Farren as though ready to shoot her down at the slightest move. Farren appeared utterly unfazed by their attitude.
If it weren’t for Gnarl’s contingent, it was not a bad crew to be going into the darkness with, despite her doubts about Jezli.
By now, they were all watching out the windows.
As they passed through the great aperture, they could see the blend of organic and inorganic on the walls: irregular spirals laid with more regular patterns, odd horns and other protuberances, all the same dead white, the color of bone or ash that has burned away anything inorganic. Nothing stirred in the shadows, and their light passed over the surfaces, the features ticking by like clockwork.
“There,” said Jezli. “There’s the dock, just ahead. Once we’re fully inside, our comms won’t work to connect us to the Thing anymore.”
“This is the last you’ll hear from us for now,” Niko told the ship. “Link me to Dabry so I can check in before we lose link with him.”
“Perhaps this is a bad time to bother the sergeant. He has been cooking.”
In the past half hour, the ship had continued to explore the boundaries of the idea of lying. It was uncertain whether this was a good tactic or not, but something about the thought of Niko finding out everything it had done in terms of waking the clone made it feel what was definitely panic.
“Perhaps it sounds to me as though this is the best time imaginable to bother the sergeant,” Niko said ominously.
The ship refrained from further comment and opened a channel to Dabry.
“Sergeant, status,” Niko snapped.
His voice was cautious. “Nothing to report at the moment, sir, but I would request that we confer on your way back to the ship.”
Something had happened, something that he did not want broadcast to the rest of those in this ship. Niko considered and decided that it had to be something about Jezli and Roxana. Had he discovered something about them that she should know before they were all back on the ship together? But if that were the case, surely he would have said something now in one of the codes they had arranged, if it affected the trip together on the space moth.
All she could do was trust him.
She said, “I believe I understand, Sergeant. I look forward to speaking with you about this.”
The ship tried to decipher exactly what she meant by this but was unable to fully figure it out. It experienced worry mixed with resignation.
They disembarked from the tiny shuttle and clustered on the vast shelf inside the opening leading into the moth’s dark interior. Gnarl and his two guards followed them out and the small group huddled together as though allying against the darkness.
By preference, everyone had left their mic live. Atlanta found the collective sound heartening, the breaths of the others reminding her that they were there with her.
Most important, Roxana was there.
It was clear that Jezli had spoken at least some of the truth. Something in the vast structure recognized the paladin, or some quality in turn about her. As she stepped from the shuttle, light bloomed where her foot touched, spreading outward. Although it dimmed as it went, finally dying some hundred meters away or so, it was easier now to see, and when Roxana took another step forward, it rebloomed, the light spreading out, strengthening.
Above them, the cavern’s ceiling was furred with shadows and indiscernible ripples.
“Here we go,” Jezli said lightly, as though they were embarking on some pleasure excursion.
“Stay close,” Roxana said to Atlanta. “A step or so behind me but where I can see you.” Atlanta did, and they pushed forward.
They walked. As they did, Roxana switched to a private channel and spoke to Atlanta. She told stories of her past as they moved through the darkness, and Atlanta did not speak, only listened, trying to fix the stories in her memory to the best of her ability.
Roxana talked about what it had been like to be reborn, to be called into the armies of the Cauldron-born, and how she had escaped that existence to become a paladin.
“I knew myself claimed by the universe,” she said, “but it could not have made that claim to me if I had not opened my heart to it in the first place. That was the hard part, and I still do not know how I did it.”
She shook her head. “I suspect I owe a great deal to some piece of me from before, something which survived long enough to give me that quality. If I had not had it, I would have met the fate my fellows who did not fall in battle faced, destroyed for being made things. But I was long gone before their final battle, and when the forces that had destroyed them came after me, the other paladins intervened and vouched for me.”
They walked farther a few silent paces before she said, “That was decades ago, and I have wandered since then. It has been lonely at times, but what is life if not loneliness? And of late, Jezli has brought some light and levity to it all.”
“You seem unlikely friends,” Atlanta said.
“There are depths to Jezli that cannot be guessed,” Roxana said. “I knew that since I first saw her, and it is one of the two reasons that I have followed her.”
“What is the other?”
“I knew that she would lead me to something I had been seeking awhile,” Roxana said.
Atlanta wanted very badly to ask what that something was. But she kept silent. If Roxana wanted to tell her, she would. The fact that she hadn’t yet probably meant she had some reason for keeping that information to herself. But curiosity burned in her.
At first, as they moved from one tunnel to another and then another, she thought Roxana was telling her all of this in order to keep her mind off their journey. But as the stories went by, she realized each one held a truth that the paladin had discovered over the course of her existence, and that she was giving each of these to Atlanta in turn.
And so they went on. Behind them walked Jezli, her quick interest flickering over everything, caught by a sparkle here, a glint there, a trace of pattern that she would pause to record. After her were Niko and Gnarl walking side by side, with his crewman behind them bringing up the rear but taking care to remain within the circle of light that moved with Roxana.
Gnarl was no conversationalist, nor was Niko of a mind to spend time swapping pleasantries with him. Instead, she counted through possibilities and probabilities as they went, trying to build plans out of them, unable to come up with anything that did not seem too flimsy, too chancy. She chewed her lip.
The air inside the suit already smelled like sweat, and Niko knew it would only get worse with time. They should try to get wherever they needed to go as quickly as possible. They all knew that.
Roxana, walking ahead of them with Atlanta, had unslung her weapon from her back and held it easily in both hands, despite its massive size. Niko thought surely that it would be of little use against missile weapons. But who knew what they would encounter deep inside the winding tunnels that filled the moth?
An abundance of things. There were archways and doorways and round slots that perhaps a child could have wriggled through. There were passageways and catwalks across stretches of empty space. It was a labyrinth and Jezli guided them through it, her fingers dancing over the necklace at her throat, information pulsing from the dance, telling her which fork to pick, which stairway to ascend, which hole to crawl through.
Sometimes the hallways were cavernous voids that could have held hordes, and sometimes they were so small that they could only walk single file.
Niko had been in many strange places in her life, between her existence as a Free Trader and her time with the Holy Hive Mind, but this was surely the strangest. And there was something oppressive about the interior of the moth, some sort of psychic malaise that seemed to accumulate on them like ancient dust or moss, layer after layer, as first almost imperceptible, and then heavier and heavier until she thought she might stagger under the weight of that unknown force.
Roxana paused to let the others catch up. When she touched Niko’s arm, some of the oppressive weight lifted. Startled, Niko looked at the paladin’s serene face and felt her cynicism melting away despite herself. The face could have been carved from gray stone, but it was not the deathly white that surrounded them. It was a gray that held a thousand other colors in it. A gray that said life rather than sterility, joy rather than sadness, purpose rather than the void.
They pushed on.
Later, Niko would have said, if she had been questioned about it, that they walked those hallways forever.
Gnarl walked beside Niko, but he didn’t want to talk to her. He didn’t need to. He should have felt smug, should have felt like he had it all in the bag, but the truth was that all he felt was envy.
What was it about Niko that made her crew stick so tightly to her? That big one—Dobby, was it?—would have died for her, and he suspected most of the others would have too. Maybe not this one she had with her, that Nneti that was all white feathers and surprising curves under all of that. Moved like a dancer too. Just as well that one had stayed back at the shuttle. She had looked like a fighter, and the fewer of those Niko had with her, the better. He grinned to himself.
Niko didn’t notice. She was frowning at Jezli Farren’s back, and that, he liked. That pleased him because he didn’t like either of them. If they were at odds, that lessened the chance that they’d be teaming up on him. No, it was good that Niko didn’t trust Farren any more than he did, because that meant Farren had no incentive to be loyal to her.
Farren. She’d tried to defraud so many, and he’d be the one to catch her and take her skull back because she was too slippery not to kill. Let her live and she’d wriggle away, and that would be intolerable.
No. He had them both, and that meant he was the best and people would acknowledge—finally—that he was the best. Best captain, best pilot, best trader, best everything, or at least, best anything that mattered.
He flicked a look over his shoulder at the bodyguard, who walked so quietly that Gnarl had been unable to hear him and had to reassure himself. But the man was there, dark and tall and thin as a spear blade. He could trust that one; the man knew better than to cross him.
That was why Gio had escaped. Gnarl hadn’t learned how to break someone without destroying them yet, or at least any time he succeeded, it was pure accident. No, now he knew how to do it, and he itched to do it to all of them. Would there be enough time to do it to Farren? Or would that give her too much of an escape window? But, oh, it would be sweet to have all of them set beneath his heel, bowing their heads. He could barely wait for that.
His brain was seized with possibilities, plots and plans and schemes, so busy that he barely saw anything around him. To some of them it was a world of wonder and terror.
To Gnarl, it was simply another place.
They hadn’t explained the entirety of things to him, but he thought he understood well enough. The secret to getting into the moth was the paladin, and that was good to know. How hard would it be to persuade such a person? Everyone had their price. He would have to speak with her, find her soft spots, the vulnerabilities that he might be able to exploit.
Because a base like the one the moth would make—well, that was a base a man could do all sorts of things from without worrying too much about interference. The paladin wouldn’t take to piracy, per se, but there were all shades of things that could be accomplished.