EACH BOARDING SHOT IS a kind of prayer.

You stand in crash webbing against the walls of a Shrike-class shuttle, hands gripping the restraints, glad of the suit underlayment wicking the sweat from your palms to feed the suit’s recyclers. Your breath comes through clenched teeth, as you pray the navigator and the pilot officer plotted a course for you that doesn’t carry you through enemy lighters or weapons fire. You’re powerless, impotent. You’ve nowhere to run, nothing to do but hope you make contact on the far end, and then you’re still in deep. Still facing the prospect of battle. Battle with no retreat, no way forward but to seize the enemy vessel.

I’d done it a dozen times before, but it never got easier.

It never gets easier to pray.

Cradled in my suit, sealed within the helmet and the environment layer, the only sound I heard was that of my own steady breathing. That and the war-drum beat of my heart hammering faster. Faster. Faster. Through the void we fell. Twenty soldiers clad in ivory and scarlet stood around me, our ship one among dozens hurled across the void at the Cielcin.

A thousand men. A thousand Irchtani. Against Emperor knows how many of the Pale. We were being reinforced by men from the Cyrusene, but they were coming in the next wave. Maybe Valka was right. Maybe it was foolishness.

I could hear the shifting of the others in the red-lighted dim. Nervous energy. Lances and plasma burners shifted from hand to hand. Whispered prayers. My suit’s entoptics projected the interior of the cabin directly onto my eyes, so it seemed I wore no mask or helm at all, save that the image was brighter, richer than my own vision would be in such low lighting. I watched the faceless legionnaires watching me, their masks smooth arcs of ceramic without slit or eye-hole.

No one said anything. They knew their duty.

Siran gave me a reassuring nod. She wore a prime centurion’s uniform, blank mask painted the same red as her tunic, three golden medallions welded to her breastplate. Not speaking, she checked the settings on her energy lance where it sat snug and collapsed in the bracket beside her. Apparently satisfied, she rested her head against the crash webbing.

“Nervous?” I asked her on a private channel, unwilling to disturb the general calm.

Her faceless mask shifted to focus on me and she replied on the same channel. “Are you?”

“Every time.”

But I could not afford to show it.

The shuttle shook around us; something had brushed against our shields. Despite the suppression fields that served to check our harsh acceleration, I felt my stomach lurch and held on, glad the helm and mask concealed my face from the men. I took a slow, deep breath, forcing myself to calm. I turned my eyes toward the door, waiting, willing it to open. Anything was better than this impotent waiting.

“Thirty seconds to contact,” came the pilot officer’s voice.

Fingers tightened on restraints, and I was not alone in bowing my head, though whether I did so in prayer or self-defense—or out of some admixture of the two—I cannot say.

“Twenty seconds! Brace for impact!”

There were no windows in the shuttle, was no way to see the Cielcin craft.

“Fifteen seconds!” the pilot officer said. The shuttle bucked as retro-rockets fired, decelerating our shuttle as we hurtled toward contact. “Ten! Five!”

“Hold on!” Siran shouted.

I pressed my knees against the sides of my compartment and braced my arms. When it came, the impact came sharp, and my head rattled against the restraints.

“Contact!” the pilot called from the rear. Almost at once the plasma cutters fired—I could hear the whine and spit of them through the airlock door.

We were already out of our harnesses. The men were hefting energy lances and plasma rifles, performing their last, nervous equipment checks. Despite the tension in the air, they each moved with cold professionalism, ready for the work that was at hand.

On the far side of the round door, two plasma cutters rotated, spiraling deeper and deeper into the hull of the Cielcin vessel. Pressure seals closed around the aperture as the Shrike limpeted itself to the ship, seal growing tighter and tighter. I shouldered my way toward the front of the shuttle, feeling at once that I was in the lift riding up to the killing floor of the Colosso with my fellow myrmidons. As if nothing had changed, though everything had.

“Are you all right?” Valka’s throaty voice came in through the conduction patch I’d taped behind my right ear, words clear despite the thousands of miles of space between us. The comms were still holding. That was good.

Unheard within my helmet, I answered her, “Should be in at any moment now.” One of the decurions reached up over my head and primed the five mapping drones that waited in berths along the arched ceiling. “What’s it like out there?”

“Shields are holding,” Valka answered. “They’ve not gotten close to us yet. We still won’t be there for an hour.”

“Keep me posted.”

“I’ll be watching your vitals.”

Bang!

The sound of metal striking metal sounded on the far side of the hatch, followed by the whoosh of fire suppressants. Then the hatch opened on dark and fog. The only light came from the still-glowing edges of the massive hatch that had fallen inward when the Shrike cut it away. The first two of our men raised their lances, hafts extending, housings flashing into place. Above their heads, the five mapping drones deployed one after the other, flying off into the darkness in a whirl of scanning red lasers that shuddered and broke on the fog. Instantly a map began forming in the top right of my vision, revealing the hall before us like the first warren of an anthill. The drones were not intelligent, required guidance from the pilot officer on our shuttle, but they were capable of not crashing into the tunnel walls, and even of rounding corners. They might not make it far into the ship before the Cielcin destroyed them, but each of our boarding craft had deployed as many, and before long we would have a credible map of the ship’s layout.

“Left or right, my lord?” one of the men asked.

Lacking better intelligence, I said, “Left. That will take us toward the rear.” A second glance at my map showed where the other Shrikes had made contact with the ship and begun mapping. The best tactic for fighting in the halls of any great ship was precisely this: cut through the hull in as many places as possible to divide the enemy’s attentions; move in small, coordinated groups; keep the fighting to narrow passages to prevent being overwhelmed; and work your way inward toward the ship’s critical systems: life-support, power, water—whatever you could find. In attacking other human vessels this tactic was more or less straightforward. The ship layout was more familiar, and all the signs and computer systems were intelligible. I could read the Cielcin writing, but not so well as I’d like.

There was something of a common plan to Cielcin ship design as well. The bulk of the ship’s critical systems were toward the rear, where the engines extended and the main body of artificial construction rose from the surface of that small world like some evil tower or the trailing arms of a jellyfish. The front mass of the two-hundred-mile-wide planetoid contained the alien city itself. We had no business there.

Pale lights flashed high on the walls in silent alarm, though we encountered no resistance. That was the strangest thing. The quiet. We ought to have been swarming with enemies already, but there were none. I kept my sword in my hand, recalling the bowels of the Demiurge and the ships we’d stormed at Cellas, Thagura, and at Aptucca. The damned quiet oppressed me, until I thought I must scream. But I advanced, a line of men to either side of me and Siran behind.

The Cielcin do not build as we, in straight lines and plain angles. The walls were rounded, ribbed and undulating, following non-Euclidean patterns I could not comprehend. The floor rose and fell in waves, the tunnel snaking along, deckplates rattling beneath our feet. The map ahead showed the path straightening, branching as we approached the rear of the vessel.

“Pallino.” I pressed a finger to the base of my jaw. “What’s your position? Have you seen anything?”

A green pulse showed on the map in the corner of my vision, and the chiliarch answered, “No movement here. You?”

“Empty.”

“They have to be somewhere.”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” I said in answer. “But I don’t like it.”

Boom.

A great noise shook the hall in which we stood, loosing dust from the gray metal ribs above our head. One of the soldiers said, “What the hell was that?”

Rather than answer, Siran shouted, “Forward! Move it!”

“Valka?” I asked, toggling comms channels with a glance to the icons that lined the bottom of my vision. “What’s going on out there?”

“They’re firing on the Mintaka.”

“We need to get further in!” I said, turning to grab the centurion by the shoulder. “Fuel reservoirs should be near the primary drives.” At Aptucca, we’d managed to plant a microfusion charge on the outer shell of their warp drive’s antimatter containment. That single, small charge in the right place had been enough to destroy Prince Ulurani’s entire worldship with all hands aboard. We didn’t want to do that here, not if there was a chance our missing soldiers were aboard. “And the holds.”

I pushed past the two men in front of me and moved off down the hall, mindful of the echoes our boots made on the decking as I went. Despite our danger, I felt a strange thrill of relief. We had found the enemy. Against all odds, we had found them. Now we only had to win.

We hurried on another few steps before the comms channel crackled to life and we heard the dreaded words, “Enemy contact!” Then came the sounds of weapons fire over the line, and a locator pin blinked on my map in time with the speaker’s words. They were miles away, further down the rear section higher up.

“We’ve got contact!” came another voice, another pin on the map.

“Contact! Contact!”

“They came out of the walls!”

Pins flared across the map, and at once I saw the shape of the trap we’d put our foot in. The Cielcin had held their forces in reserve, waited for our groups to pull themselves a little deeper into the ship, waited until we weren’t quite certain of our surroundings or of the way back to our shuttles . . .

“Square formation!” I shouted, and at once the double line of men about me pivoted so that ten faced ahead and ten faced back the way they had come. Unlike most legionary units, where only one man in three wore a body shield, my men were all hoplites, all shielded.

That order saved us.

Boom.

The hall shook again, followed by a series of hollow thuds as the wall panels between the ribs slid aside. A wave of the Cielcin nahute struck us like arrows from either side. The things flashed like metal serpents rippling in the dim air. One shot straight for my face, drill-bit teeth snarling. I kindled Olorin’s sword and struck, slicing the thing cleanly in half.

There were at least a dozen more, though as I wheeled about I saw one blasted to smithereens by plasma fire and another crushed by a hoplite’s energy lance.

My blood ran cold an instant later, for a terrible wailing—high and thin as a winter wind through dead trees—issued from the dark to either side. I knew a Cielcin war cry when I heard one, and letting my suit speakers carry my voice with all the force and volume I could muster, I answered them, not with a cry, but with a command. “Light!” I bellowed, not knowing how prophetic that order would prove by the light of history. “Light!” I activated my suit torches, casting white beams from both shoulders and forearms. The others joined me, and the gloom of that alien hall retreated from us, light piercing the deepest shadows.

I have seen many terrible things in my life, Reader. Many terrible things. I have trod on battlefields across half a hundred worlds and smelled the smoke of cities burning. I have been a guest of the Undying in Vorgossos and enjoyed the hospitality of the so-called Scourge of Earth. Few things are to me now as terrible as the painted masks of Cielcin warriors shining out of the Dark. One of them threw itself from the shadows and fell upon one of my hoplites. The man panicked and dropped his lance, and big as he was and strong, the xenobite was stronger. It pinned him to the ground and—to my astonishment—ripped the shield projector from the man’s belt. A moment later one of the orbiting nahute—stymied by the shields we others wore—found the soft part of the man’s armor between thigh and groin and drilled its way in. The helmets muffled his screaming, but still I heard it.

Like so many screams, I will never stop hearing it.

One of the others shot the Cielcin who had done the deed. Blood and bone and the black matter of its brain painted the floor, and a thin smoke hung a moment in the foggy air. Some held breath rushed out, and whatever seal held chaos at bay tore well and true. At a guess, there must have been thirty of them. Perhaps forty. There were twenty-two of us. Twenty-one by then. By rights we should have been destroyed, but the remaining soldiers of my First Cohort stood fast, and the Cielcin screamers had no shields to protect them.

We had long ago abandoned the use of phase disruptors in battling the Cielcin. The xenobites’ nervous systems did not respond to disruptor fire as ours do. Laser and plasma. Light and fire. Those were the way.

Those . . . and the sword.

I leaped past our line, sword moving in a rising arc that tore through one of the enemy from hip to shoulder. It fell in two ragged pieces, white sword dropped from nerveless fingers. Seeing this, three of the others backed off, dodging behind the ribbed pillars that separated the main hall from the sort of arras where they’d lain in wait.

“Deni raka Aeta ba-okun ne?” I asked, speaking their own tongue. Who is your master?

The Cielcin cocked their heads to hear their words in the mouth of one of us human vermin, but I could not see their faces. The resin masks they wore concealed their faces save for their terrible mouths, and their teeth shone in the darkness like bits of broken glass. They had no eyeholes, and I wondered if the material was transparent from the inside, or if—as with our own helmets—there were cameras that saw for them, that protected their too-sensitive eyes from the light we’d brought to blind them.

“Deni raka Aeta ba-okun ne?” I asked again, moving the point of my sword from one enemy to the next like an accusing finger.

As if in answer, two of the Cielcin charged forward, thinking perhaps their numbers would aid them. But the edge of a highmatter sword is less than one molecule wide, and I encountered no resistance as I cut them both down with a single stroke. They toppled past me, black blood pilling on my hydrophobic cape, pattering to the ground. The third Cielcin snarled and aimed a clawed finger at me. It must have had some command over the nahute that threaded amongst us, for no sooner had it done so than three of the metal serpents wheeled and flew toward me. One caromed off my shield like a shark striking the side of its tank in blind fury. I recoiled, but kept my feet, retreating toward the line of hoplites at my back. Someone fired on the Cielcin with the upraised finger, and it toppled to the ground with a hole in its shoulder. One of the nahute fell smoking from an unseen energy beam, and I danced back, mindful of the men about me and the way they restricted my movements. A sword does not discriminate between friend and foe. A highmatter sword less so.

Still I caught one of the alien drones as it rebounded off my shield, and Siran felled the other. For a moment, it looked like we might win the engagement after all.

For a moment.

The xenobites’ high and ghostly wail went up again, piercing as the whistle of air through a leaking bulkhead out into the formless dark of space. There were more of them. Two dozen more at least.

“Forward!” I shouted, pointing my sword. The hall ahead was clear. We had to get out from between the hammer and the anvil, force the Cielcin to fight us in the hall where our arms would give us the advantage. Three dead men lay on the ground before me, ragged holes chewed through their environment layer. We were eighteen, then. At most eighteen. I thought I heard Valka’s breathing through the comm, mingled with the snatches of orders and of weapons fire from the other groups. There were even the clicks and pops of the Irchtani battle language. More than half our groups had been hit at the precise same time. “About face!”

I had been leading our brief retreat along the darkened hall, and so then found myself at the rear, looking back over the shoulder of my comrades at a sea of masked Cielcin faces as they spilled into the hall. Some of them climbed the walls, moving from rib to rib with their pale, long-fingered hands in the microgravity.

“Fire! Fire! Fire!” Siran was shouting. The violet shouts of plasma fire answered her—more blue in the alien air than I had ever seen. Sulfur in the air, if I remembered my chemistry. I fancied I could smell sulfur, even through the suit. The brimstone stench of hell.

Granted a moment’s respite behind my men, I said, “Pallino! Signal every unit to link up into groups of three. We need to form larger groups. It’ll make it harder for them to pick us off!”

“Aye, lad!” came the reply.

Dead xenobites littered the floor, but more kept coming, clambering over their fallen brethren or following still more up the walls. I had a sudden impression that we had climbed into a giant anthill, with the rounded corridors and the way the Cielcin moved toward us. But my men retreated calmly now, step by careful step in time with Siran’s orders, giving ground only in exchange for more time to fire.

The Cielcin were undeterred. Their berserkers fought with little concept for their individual lives—and why shouldn’t they? They were slaves, body and soul, servants to whichever prince they called their master, and that master had ordered them to fight. There was no room for disobedience in the common Cielcin soldier. No free will. They abdicated free will to their commanders, who were in turn the slaves of commanders greater still until all served at the behest of an Aeta prince, who alone was free and a god in all but truth.

“ ’Tis an auxiliary unit on its way to you.” Valka’s voice came tense but quiet in my ear, strangely calming. I acknowledged and drew my sidearm with my left hand, aimed the plasma burner carefully. Fired. One of the Cielcin fell from the wall, knocking two of its fellows from their feet. One of the nahute sped toward me, and I waited, let it impact off my shield before I sliced it in two.

They were still coming.

One of the Cielcin fell from the roof above, white sword flashing. The point caught one of my men in the soft spot between neck and shoulder, and he went down. The ceramic blade came out red, and the berserker wheeled, slashing at one of the others. The blade sparked off the hoplite’s armor. The xenobite spun, kicked the soldier in the chest with all its inhuman strength. The hoplite slammed into the wall, the wind knocked out of him. All this in the space of perhaps three seconds. The Cielcin raised its sword, point downward, to skewer the man just as it had the other.

The blade fell.

In two pieces.

I sliced clean through weapon and wielder alike, and—holstering my sidearm once again—helped the soldier to his feet.

“We all should have one of those,” he said, nodding at my sword. If only that were possible. There were not many materials that were hard to come by in the galaxy, but highmatter was one of them. It could not be mass-produced, required careful tailoring of particles at the subatomic level to create the substance of the blade. Few were the artisans with the skill to craft such weapons, and many were the hours and great the energies required. Thousands of miles of particle accelerator might run for months before quantum chance produced the exotic matter that formed the core of such a blade. Each cost more than a starship, which was part of why I’d been so astonished when Sir Olorin Milta had given one to me.

“Were it so easy!” I said.

Just then another cry went up, higher and colder than the last, but stranger. More musical. Such a sound I had not heard in all my days. Then there came a great rushing of air and the beat of mighty wings. A dark shape emerged from the gloom behind the Cielcin, and I saw the flash of steel.

The Irchtani had come.

One of them tumbled through the air, slashing its zitraa through an arc that struck the head off one of the Cielcin and clove another one between its crown of horn. It landed between our line and the advancing Pale, and the Cielcin themselves recoiled in shock, and no wonder. They had never seen an Irchtani before, and the avian creature bristled, the feathers on its great pinioned arms standing on end, making it seem far larger than it was. Then the others hit the Cielcin from the rear, and now it was they who were caught between hammer and anvil.

It was over as quickly as it had begun and with as little warning.

I counted our dead. Six in all, plus two Irchtani. Minimal, under the circumstances.

“Who has the command here?” I asked our xenobites.

One Irchtani, green-feathered and squatter than the rest, answered me. “I am!” I knew him at once. How I had not recognized him when he flew over the heads of the enemy to draw their attention, I cannot say.

I saluted the auxiliary. “Thank you, Udax. You were just in time.”

The bird returned my salute, and for the first time I processed that his combat armor did not cover his wings. I wondered at that. What would happen if the environment failed and the air rushed out? But I supposed the Irchtani could not use their wings otherwise.

We stood a moment in the midst of the carnage while our men stripped the bodies, smashed any unused nahute where they hung on the Cielcin’s belts like coils of rope, and stripped equipment from their fallen brothers.

The darkness yawned to either side, unmapped.

I keyed an order into my terminal, signaling the pilot officer to reroute one of the mapping drones back to our location.

“What now?” Siran asked.

“They want us in the main halls,” I replied, aiming my suit lamps into the darkness behind the doors whence the ambush had come. To the men searching in there, I called, “Do you see anything?”

The response came on our unit channel, “Tunnels, my lord, just like you said!”

“Don’t go too far yet!” I ordered. Then to Siran and the Irchtani commander I added, “We need to get out of the parts of the ship they wanted us to be in. We need to move.”