I BURST ONTO THE bridge like the tide, black coattails flowing in my wake. “What’s happened?” I demanded, mounting the arc of steps that brought me up from the officers’ pit to the captain’s platform, bootheels ringing against dark metal.

Otavia Corvo stood hunched over the display well, fingers gripping the rim. A schematic of the Tamerlane glowed in the air before her, critical systems highlighted green and red against the blue of the hull, data flickering in square panels all around.

“Not sure,” she said.

“Some sort of gravity net,” Tor Varro said. He sat strapped into one of the crash couches to the side of the central console, hands wrapped about his restraints. From where he was, he had a clear view of all the data coming in through Corvo’s holography well. When he caught me looking to him, he said, “Conjecture. But all our electronics are still online.”

“Have we got anything on sensors?” I asked. It had only taken me three minutes to reach the bridge from the dome, and the atmosphere among the officers about me was one of confusion and rapidly cooling panic.

Apropos of nothing, Commander Aristedes said, “Shields are primed and holding.”

“Has anyone opened fire on us yet?” I demanded, leaning over the rail to look down over Aristedes and his junior officers at the tactical station.

Right on cue, an indicator flashed on Corvo’s display.

“Think that was a MAG round!” said one of the junior tac officers from her station. “Shields holding.” Someone had fired a magnetically accelerated bolt of tungsten more than a yard across from tens of thousands of miles away.

“Do we have a read on them?” Corvo demanded, zooming her projection out so that the ghostly Tamerlane seemed little more than a mote in the center of infinite shadow.

“Heat signatures!” the junior officer said again. I leaned further over the rail, watching the tactical station below. Aristedes and his lieutenants were tracking three tightly clustered points of light some hundred thousand miles off.

Aristedes himself said, “I don’t recognize the configuration. It’s massive.”

Memory of the Demiurge rose in me, the vast ship of Kharn Sagara hundreds of miles long—and of the Enigma of Hours, the mighty Sojourner that might have fit eight vessels the size of the Tamerlane within its central hold stacked end-to-end. I thought too of the great vessel of Prince Ulurani at Aptucca, which had been larger than many a small moon.

The shield indicator pulsed again from the console at my back.

“These are just probing shots,” I said, almost to myself. “They know we’re shielded.”

“Do we have visual?” Durand asked, hurrying from the upper level to join Aristedes in tactical.

“Where are the other ships?” Corvo demanded. “I want eyes on the hostile!”

My hands tightened on the rail as Koskinen and White scrambled a seeker probe and fired it toward our assailant. I had a sudden, awful thought that the other ships had left us, that we alone had been snatched out of warp and that the others continued their super-luminal career toward Dion Station, unaware of our predicament until it was too late. Whatever had pulled us out of warp had wrenched us into a lazy spin, and the target Aristedes was tracking on his console appeared to hover high above us, looming like Damocles’s cursed sword.

I felt terribly useless standing on that bridge. I am many things, but I am no true spacer. I could do nothing but stand hard by as my people did their jobs—did what they were trained to do, what I depended on them to do. My fears evaporated in the next instant as Pherrine said, “I’ve got contact with the Mintaka and the Cyrusene.”

“Multiple contacts!” said another of the junior tac officers. A thousand points of light flared across the space between us, accelerating at rates no human being could bear without suppression fields.

I knew that pattern all too well, and Lorian confirmed it a moment after. His high, aristocratic tenor filled the bridge at once like a trumpet blast. “Incoming!” You would not think to look at him that the small intus was capable of so great a noise. A hundred things must have happened at once, running through the minds of my officers. Incoming could mean any of a dozen things: missiles, plasma bombardment, probes, lighter craft, boarding shuttles. We had no way of knowing at this distance.

We did not have the luxury of waiting to find out. Corvo could see on her console what Aristedes saw on his own; she had to act. Veteran that she was, she knew the primary threat to a vessel armored and shielded as ours came not from long-range weaponry. Even unshielded, it would take antilithium or highmatter to cut through the adamantine plate on the dorsal hull. Our greatest threat came from boarding shuttles, cutter-craft that would limpet themselves to the outer hull where it was common steel or carbon composite. It was to that threat we needed to first respond. “Launch the aquilarii!” she cried. “Ten wings, hold the others in reserve.”

“Aye, captain!”

I did not hear Aristedes give the order, nor hear the alarm blaring in the pilots’ barracks levels above us, but I saw them all the same. Two hundred men hurled from their rest to their duties, scrambling to pull on padded pressure suits and helmets, rushing to the lifts that sent them rattling down to the equator and the ladders that brought them to their ships. I felt the resounding bell-like clang as docking clamps disengaged and the Sparrowhawks and Peregrine fighters shot from their launch tubes like missiles. I had ridden in them before—though I am but a poor pilot myself. How well I remember the silent dark of the tube rushing past—the only sound the faint beeping of instruments and the ragged rasp of breath! How clearly I recall the flash and the sudden shimmering of stars as we turned and soared over the dark curve of the dorsal hull or down to thread the hanging towers. I watched them deploy on the tactical displays. Two hundred lighter craft that fell into tight formation about the Tamerlane, keeping just outside the limit of our shields. They would assist the Tamerlane’s gunners in fending off the boarding vessels while we returned fire on their ship.

“Should have visual in a moment, captain!” said White, the navigator, his voice low and terse as ever. “The commander’s right. It’s massive.”

“How massive?” I asked. He told me. “That’s the size of a small planet!”

“Aye, my lord!” White said.

I advanced along the catwalk so that I stood above the navigator’s station. “Is it the Extrasolarians?” No sooner had I asked the question did a chime sound at White’s console. Images from the seeker. “What is it?”

White did not reply.

“What is it, Lieutenant?”

The man’s numb fingers found the right controls and relayed the video feed to the false window at the front of the bridge. The star field vanished in a snap, replaced by another. A dark shape moved against the black, masking the unfixed stars.

It was the size of a dwarf planet, as I had said, and once perhaps as round. The seeker probe had passed it already, propelled by a shipboard laser already to twenty percent the speed of light. It still looked like a planet from the front end, a great cap of ice and stone that shone faintly in the starlight and by a light all its own. But behind? Behind it trailed the gutted remnants of a world converted, extruded into halls and towers and warrens like the warrens of ants. A termite-chewed worldship large as any I had seen. Large as the ship I’d shattered at Aptucca. Large as Prince Aranata’s palace that Titus Hauptmann had destroyed.

The Cielcin had come.

“I’m tracking clouds of boarders approaching the other ships, too!” White exclaimed, having regained his senses. “The Mintaka is breached! Captain Verus has sealed the bridge!”

My hand went uselessly to the sword at my hip. “We’re next,” I said. “They’ll try and get a team aboard to take our shields and engines offline.” I hurried back toward Corvo. “Give me the comm.”

She stepped sideways just enough to permit me access to the ship’s internal broadcast. I drew the remote out and held it to my mouth. “Attention all, this is Lord Marlowe.” I could feel the silence in my chest filling the ship around me as I spoke. “All hands to battle stations. Repeat. All hands to battle stations. Prepare for boarders. We have engaged the Cielcin. Repeat. We have engaged the Cielcin.” I paused a moment, never sure what else to say if anything. I swallowed, and though I did not believe I added, “May Earth keep and protect us. Marlowe out.”

Corvo was staring at me, but when I noticed, she nodded and returned to her work, relaying orders over the bridge’s sound system to save herself from shouting. She looked like she was about to say something, but she never had the chance. A bright light flared across the massive screen, and a moment after Pherrine said, “The Mintaka just accelerated toward the enemy ship!”

“What is Verus doing?” Corvo leaned over the projection well. “He’s flying right at them!”

Arms crossed, I watched the tactical display. The Mintaka had shot toward the Cielcin worldship, but at a high angle. “Is he trying for orbital insertion?” I asked. The bigger Cielcin ships were so massive the most practical way to assail them was to fall into a low, fast orbit. To treat them like a planet.

“Get Verus on the comm!” Captain Corvo exclaimed.

No image of the haggard captain appeared, but a voice panel opened in the air by Corvo. “Verus.” There was a tightness in his voice that undercut his calm. The man was a professional.

“What’s your situation, captain?” Corvo asked.

“They took out our lighters. Some of the demons got aboard. I’ve sealed the bulkheads. It’s under control.”

Corvo didn’t miss a beat. “How many of them?”

“Couple hundred. It’s under control.” He said those last words like a mantra. Like a prayer. We heard shouting behind him.

Then the connection died.

Corvo keyed the console. “What happened? Pherrine, bring him back.”

“Communication’s down, ma’am. Ship’s still there, though.” The communications officer’s own voice had gone tight as a coiled spring.

Aristedes’s clipped accent cut in. “But they’re not under thrust. Something’s happened.” What that something was had to wait. A warning light blinked on the tactical consoles below, and the intus raised his high voice. “Hostiles accelerating! Still on intercept course!”

Boarding craft.

I turned my attention to the window, squinted out into the Dark, willing the enemy to reveal itself, though they were as yet thousands of miles away.

From his place below, Lorian Aristedes said, “Prepare to deploy AM mines on my mark.”

He had not waited for orders, knowing all too well his duty.

“Mark.”

A spray of red points fanned out across the space between us and the Cielcin ship on the holograph in front of me, the AM mines expanding into a flat sheet between us and them. They were simple enough machines, each a hollow sphere containing a few grains of antilithium in magnetic suspension. Proximity would trigger them to end that suspension. The antimatter would collide with the material of the mine itself and the resulting fireball of matter-antimatter annihilation would destroy anything unshielded within its effective radius.

Even adamant.

I pivoted my attention back to the false window, and as I turned, one of the junior techs switched the view from the Cielcin ship to better capture an image of the approaching swarm. The Cielcin attack craft were barely visible against the Dark, even magnified a thousand times. We could see them only backlit by the fire of their drives as they howled toward us. Other views out other cameras played in tiles along the edges of the mighty window-screen, and here and there I caught glimpses of a gray Sparrowhawk or white Peregrine streaking about the Tamerlane. I gritted my teeth and held the edge of my cape in one fist, waiting, counting down to a zero I could only guess at.

“Any second now,” Durand said.

Light brighter than a dozen suns flared out across the darkness. Light!

And silence. No sound nor shock of air was there to disturb that bottomless calm. Ten thousand years hence perhaps the light of that explosion would reach some distant world and spark like lightning across its foreign sky. And in that distant age perhaps some shepherd would look up and gasp in wonderment and alarm, but until that day no other fanfare would mark that first destructive salvo, unless it was Lorian’s dry remark from the tac officer’s seat. “Got them.”

But he had not got them all. The boarding craft were stretched out in waves across hundreds of miles of space, and the rest came screaming in faster through the haze where once the mines had been.

Corvo strode past me onto the catwalk, full voice thundering. “Concentrate main dorsal batteries on the Cielcin mothership!”

“No! No!” I said, stepping in. “Belay that!”

Otavia rounded on me. “This is my ship, Hadrian! What the hell are you doing?” I must have made her angry; she never called me Hadrian on the bridge. Her jaw was clenched and her amber eyes had crystallized.

I owed an explanation, but my reason was only just catching up to my instincts, and it took me a tense moment. “Our missing legions are probably aboard. We need to fight fire with fire. Take the fight to them.”

The captain’s amber eyes narrowed. “We didn’t plan for this.”

I turned fully to face her, pointing at the false window over her shoulder. “We need to outflank them, disable their warp capabilities if we can.”

“You want us to fly right at that swarm of boarding craft?”

Aristedes spoke from below, high voice almost laughing. “That’ll surprise them!”

Corvo shook her head, leaned over the rail to call to Pherrine. “Where are the others?”

As if in answer a bright streak of fire shone against the Dark, a great violet stream of superheated plasma. Pherrine answered, “That was the Pride of Zama. They’re advancing!” Her fingers flew over the console before her, and she nodded along with more intelligence as it came in over her headset. “The Androzani’s taken on boarders! They confirm it is the Cielcin!”

“Damn it!” Corvo said. “Go after them! Koskinen, take us forward, full thrust! Put us into orbit around that thing!”

“Hold!” Aristedes shouted. “Hold hold!”

“What is it?” Corvo asked, glowering down at her tactical officer.

Lorian did not look up. He raised one skeletal finger and held it there like a conductor’s baton at the start of a symphony. “When we go for burn, we’ll leave the aquilarii behind.”

“We’ll circle back for them!” Corvo said.

“Or!” Aristedes said, “We wait for the Cielcin to close distance, then burn.”

I saw the shape of Lorian’s plan then. “You’ll lure the boarders right into the lighters’ jaws.”

I could not see his face, only the halo of his nearly white hair shining, but I heard the smile in his voice all the same. “If the Pale are using their usual boarding craft they won’t last five minutes against our boys.”

Corvo ran both hands through her wild hair. After a moment, she nodded. “See it done.” Then, fixing me with that iron stare, she said, “I hope you’re right about this.”

“So do I,” I said.

“Prepare for hard burn on my mark! Pherrine, Aristedes, relay our plan to the aquilarii. I don’t want those wings surprised when we boost out of here! And Lord Marlowe, you may wish to hold onto something!” Corvo called, storming back toward the holography well and her chair. Still irritated with me, then. I said nothing, but I did grasp the rail at my side, feet planted. The suppression fields would counter most of the inertial drift from our acceleration, but there would still be enough to knock an untrained spacer from his feet.

I was not entirely without training.

“Hold!” Aristedes said. The intus had not yet lowered his finger, and spoke in a tone as suggested he held the reins on a line of cavalry. “Hold!” I could make out the swarm of Cielcin boarding craft on Corvo’s projection, closing like a slow rain of arrows. Closer. Closer. “Hold!” They had closed the vast distances between us in a matter of minutes, and I was forced to remind myself that the Cielcin lived in space—had been adapting to its rigors for millennia. Perhaps they suffered the stress of high acceleration better than we. I never rightly learned, never fully understood the degree to which the Cielcin had changed themselves as we had done in creating the great confusion of humanity. As we had crafted the palatine, the patrician, and the homunculus. As others had perverted their flesh with machines or accepted fouler praxis in the bowels of Vorgossos, so too the Cielcin doubtless had altered the course of their own evolution, hardening themselves against the Dark.

“Hold!” Lorian’s bright, chilly voice rang out once again. “Mark!”

“Mark!” Corvo bellowed.

Koskinen fired the primary sub-light drives, and the Tamerlane shot forward. I did not so much as stagger against the rail. The stars beyond our ship did not seem to move, so vast was the Dark between them. But move we did. The Cielcin landing craft tore past us, red motes rushing across the Tamerlane on Corvo’s display. Outside, in the endless Dark, they fired attitudinal jets, yawing about, correcting their approach vectors. The Tamerlane answered them, gun emplacements blazing, plasma fire and missiles scouring the night. I watched it all on Corvo’s holography well and on the tactical displays visible in an arc on the level below me and on the mighty screen at the fore of the bridge. In one corner a camera feed went dark. One of the Peregrine pilots must have collided with one of the Cielcin vessels.

But Lorian’s plan had worked. The bulk of the Cielcin attackers had overshot us by hundreds of miles—thousands—and had fallen squarely into the hands of our aquilarii.

Safe for the moment and with enough time to think, Corvo asked, “What’s the status on the Mintaka?”

“They’re off course,” Pherrine said. “Main engines offline.”

“Shields are holding, though,” said Adric White.

Aristedes waved an almost dismissive hand. “They’re disabled and falling into a decaying orbit around the enemy vessel. There’s nothing we can do from here.”

An eerie calm had settled over the bridge then, each man talking to each in turn. I stood aloof from them, not a deck officer myself, contemplating the little red star of the Mintaka where it orbited the Cielcin vessel ahead of us.

“Assuming their shields hold and they can keep their decks clear,” Tor Varro said, referring to the Cielcin that gotten aboard, “they might be able to hold until we can close the distance.”

Nodding, I turned from the scholiast and the central console and strode along the captain’s walk toward the main windows yet again. “Where are the other ships?” I asked, standing with my nose mere centimeters from the glass. I squinted, searching for some flash or spark to mark the passing of a ship or of weapons fire. But there was nothing. No flash of laser or crash of exploding vessels.

Only darkness. Darkness and silence. And cold.

“Here is the kingdom of Death,” I quoted, murmuring under my breath, “and we the living have no place in it . . .” I couldn’t recall who had written that. It wasn’t Eliot or Shakespeare. It might have Bastien, in one of his darker plays, or D’Lorca. I was glad no one had heard me, feeling suddenly foolish. Presently I raised my voice. “Where are the other ships?”

Pherrine’s clear voice rang out in answer, “The Pride of Zama is still closing. They were the farthest out. The others are both between us and the enemy.”

“And the Androzani is still taking on boarders?”

“I think so, my lord,” she answered, and as I turned I saw her glance up at me, pale face lit by the screen before her. “We lost their comms three minutes ago.”

My mouth opened of itself to utter an oath to blacken the very face of Earth, but I never spoke it. A series of white indicators pulsed distractingly on the navigator’s console in my periphery, and Adric White’s rough voice cut in. “There’s something happening to the Mintaka I don’t quite understand.”

Commander Aristedes craned his neck to peer at the navigator. I followed his gaze, then realizing this was foolishness, directed my attentions toward the nearer captain’s console. Corvo had rescaled the projection, and I could see the knife-shape of the Mintaka in high orbit over the alien ship. It was hard to tell on the grainy sensor scan, but it was turning, slewing about as though it had skidded on ice, turning about a point near its bow.

“They have it on a line,” the intus said. “Harpooned.”

“That shouldn’t be possible!” Durand objected. “The ship is shielded!”

“Not from the inside,” Corvo said. “The boarders must have deployed the cable.”

They kept on in this vein a moment, and as they did I imagined the Cielcin boarding craft—like black claws sunk deep into the hulls of our ships. I could picture Cielcin berserkers clambering over the icy hull, sinking anchor lines into the softer metals while their brethren fought on the decks within. They meant to drag the Mintaka down to the frigid surface of their worldship, to break it against their hull as a bird breaks a clam.

We had to stop them if we could.

My eyes met Corvo’s through the holograph between us. We didn’t have to exchange a word; she knew what I wanted and bobbed her head. “Aristedes! Tell Crim to have a boarding party ready to launch when we’re at our closest to the Androzani. He’s to be their relief.” I was hurrying back toward the captain’s station as I spoke, cape billowing behind me like wings to speed my passage.

“Aye, Lord Marlowe,” Lorian said. “The First Cohort?”

“Not the first,” I said, stopping just above the diminutive officer’s station. “Have him take the third. Callista’s people haven’t seen action in a while. I need the first.”

“For what?” Durand asked, and for a moment the light caught his glasses in such a way they whited out the lenses.

I hesitated a moment in answering. It took time for my tongue to catch up to my disordered thoughts. “How long ’til we’re in orbit around that thing?” I asked, and though I addressed the bridge at large my eyes never left Corvo’s display and the rough model of the Cielcin worldship that floated there.

“Just over two hours, lord,” Koskinen replied.

“Will the shields hold?”

One of Aristedes’s lieutenants answered me. “Unless they’ve got something nasty planned, my lord, yes.”

“Very good.” I turned on my heel and hurried for the upper door and access to the express tram that ran from the bridge to the officers’ dormitories far aft.

Tor Varro—uncharacteristically quiet through all this—made to rise from his seat as I passed. “Where are you going?”

I waved him to sit and did not break stride. “To prepare a boarding party. I want the First Cohort and the Irchtani ready and waiting to launch within an hour. We’re taking the fight to the Cielcin. And Varro!” I did stop then but did not turn. “Find Prince Alexander and seal him in his quarters. Have Crim post guards inside and out. If we are breached, we cannot allow His Highness to come to harm.” I sensed a pregnancy in Varro’s quiet and turned to face him. The scholiast still sat there in his green uniform, apparently unruffled by the entire situation. “And order Verus to prepare troops as well and to help liberate the Androzani.”

Just then a titanic flash whited out the primary view screen, illuminating the entire bridge.

Into the silence that followed, one of Aristedes’s lieutenants said, “The . . . the Androzani is gone, captain.”

I did not hear what Corvo said next. I looked back to face the window. All was still and terribly silent within me, and the commotion around fell hushed and far away. The Cielcin must have compromised the fuel containment on the Androzani’s warp drive. Like the AM mines but incomparably vaster, the resulting annihilation had wiped out the entire ship and every man, woman, and xenobite aboard. The Cielcin had sacrificed themselves to even the odds.

What could we do against such rapine? Such ravenous hate?

“Do not let a single one of the Pale aboard!” I ordered my officers. “Post a detail on the warp cores now, before it becomes a problem! I want everyone ready.” Then I turned to go, trying not to think of hook-nosed Captain Yanek and thousands who burned along with him on his pyre. There were not even atoms left to bury. The blast would have reduced him and his crew and every strut and deckplate of the Androzani to pure energy. That energy, too, would fall upon the face of some nameless child in an age ten thousand years hence, and they might wonder to look upon so brief and brilliant a star.

Or perhaps no one would notice at all.

But we had noticed. And I had noticed. And I clenched my fists in muted fury.

“My lord!” Varro again. “Where are you going?” The same idiot question again. Now I understood how Otavia must have felt.

I whirled and pointed out the window with a steady hand. “To lead the boarding party. Myself.”