WITHOUT MY HELMET AND suit optics, I would have been blind. The suit built a hideous simulacrum of the alien tunnels from infrared and sonar and what little available light there was to see. Or perhaps the simulacrum was perfect, and the tunnels truly were hideous. They felt damp, like the walls of a cave, like the tunnels of Calagah on Emesh. There was condensation on my armor, and my cape hung dank and gray from my shoulders. There were puddles on the uneven floor, and here and there a rough doorway opened on one side or the other.

The tunnel stretched on, carrying us deeper and deeper into the Cielcin ship—though it hardly seemed a ship at all but a series of a natural caves. All that rock and stone was one way to insulate a vessel against the wild radiation of space. The Cielcin did not build. They burrowed. All our human construction: our towers, castles, and fortresses. Our temples and warehouses, even our humble homes . . . all of them reach for the heavens. The Cielcin dig toward hell.

I had been on Cielcin ships before, but never before had I plumbed one to such secret depths. We were not stopped, not accosted by any others for some time, and came at length to a mighty chamber where enormous wheels turned in the dark, clanking and rattling.

“The hell is this?” Siran asked.

“They’re not running this thing on steam, are they?” said one of the others.

“It’s not ship’s systems,” I said, unsure just how I knew it to be so. “It’s a factory.”

One of the Irchtani squawked and pulled his hand away from a vat he’d found, swearing in his native tongue. Moving to his side, I saw what had startled him. The vat contained what looked like bloated white worms writhing over one another. I squinted up at the drum-like wheels turning overhead, saw the thread and sheets of fabric being pulled between them. It was a factory. A textile factory. They were making cloth.

“Valka, you should see this!” I said on our private channel, and told her. Once upon a time, such a place would have been a wonder to me. To see just how it was the Cielcin lived and produced even a thing as mundane as their clothing would have a privilege. Now I felt nothing but trepidation and the desire to be away. The loss of that youthful innocence set a steady ache building in my chest. I had been a very different man when I was young, but a piece of that broken Hadrian—of the Hadrian who had died so long ago—shone through my face a moment.

Silkworms. Once, I would have marked this similarity as a sign our two peoples were not so different. I knew better now. They were not our silkworms. They had a thousand spidery legs that tangled against one another, more like a sea creature than an insect. They were not the same at all.

“We should move on,” I said.

---

The faint alarm lights still blinked on the ceiling. To the xenobites I felt sure they must be blinding, better for them than any klaxon. We passed through still more halls and chambers, always with the feeling that the enemy was just ahead of us.

“We’re nearing your location.” Pallino’s voice came over the comm. “There’s a big chamber up ahead. We’ll meet you there.”

The chiliarch’s voice was strained. “Have you seen any more of them?”

“Since the first wave? No.” I followed Udax through a wide, low arch into a new series of tunnels. “They’re preparing for another wave. I can feel it. Be ready.”

The area we’d come from fed into the chamber Pallino had mentioned. The drones had not mapped it completely; the operator had directed the drone to fly on through rather than waste too much time mapping side passages. But this chamber was itself large, and rose by terraced levels to either side, reminding me of nothing so much as one of the tiered shopping malls common in the largest Norman cities. There were no stalls, no storefronts, but there were doors lining the levels above us and opening to either side.

“Let’s risk more light,” Siran suggested, removing a pocket glowsphere from her belt. She twisted it, shook the luminescent chemicals to activate them. White light like a cold and distant star blossomed in her fist and she tossed it high as it would go. It flew far farther than it might in the ship’s low gravity. It bounced off the ceiling, drifted lazily down the hall on its weak repulsor field, shedding its light over the terraced levels.

Here at least were signs of civilization. Metal doors stood sunk into the rough stone walls. Silk banners hung from the rails and formless statues of poured metal beaten into the distended shapes of Cielcin and creatures strange to me stood on plinths or in niches. It had the look of some primitive town.

“Where are they?” Udax wondered aloud.

“Not here,” Siran answered. She was right. There was no sign of the Cielcin. In an open space like that, they should have been visible on infrared. But then . . . there had been no sign of them in the hall.

I chewed my lip, taking a moment to survey our surroundings. “Check the doors on this level. Double quick.” I gestured to a pair of hoplites. “You both, check the main doors there.” I pointed toward a massive bulkhead door that stood at the far end of the lozenge-shaped square. They obeyed, and as they did a small knot of Udax’s soldiers moved off to check the nearest doors, waddling across the narrow plaza. I waited, listening to the comms chatter, watching our battle groups work their way deeper aboard. A few had encountered further resistance, but most—like us—had not. I was starting to wonder if in fact that first bitter wave in the halls had been all the Cielcin had in them.

“Lord!” one of the Irchtani emerged from a side door and flapped a wing in my direction. “You must see!”

I wish that I hadn’t, but in my ignorance I crossed the open space to the door . . . and immediately turned away.

The door had opened on what I took for a Cielcin dwelling: ceiling just high enough to accommodate its xenobite dwellers, walls of roughly chiseled stone with little decoration save the circular carvings they used for writing in imitation of the Quiet’s anaglyphs. Papery hangings flapped from the walls, disturbed by our presence, and there was no sound save the distant, hushed beeping of some electric system. There were no cushions, nothing that spoke of comfort, only of the spartan order by which the beasts lived their lives. It might have been a barracks chamber for all I knew. The Cielcin often lived communal lives, particularly toward the bottom of their social hierarchies. Their proles did not know the dignity of family life.

None of this came to mind to mind at the time. I held my breath, used a scholiast technique to calm my breathing and slow my beating heart. I was glad of the suit’s environment layer. It wicked the cold sweat from my hands and the back of my neck.

The room’s occupants must have fled at the alarm. The signs of recent use were everywhere in evidence: a drinking bulb half-filled rested in a tripod holder on a side table above a gentle gas flame. Scattered papers littered the floor. There were bowls on the dining slab—low on the floor, there were no chairs—each holding a half-gnawed portion of what looked like raw meat.

The man lay naked on the slab. What was left of him. Both his legs were gone—and what was between them—and one of the arms as well. What remained of those missing limbs was spread between the bowls, I guessed. I saw the missing hand discarded, the meat stripped from the thumb and fingers.

There was surprisingly little blood, but I knew the reason for that at once.

“One of our lost legionnaires?” I asked.

The Irchtani nodded. “He had a 3-3-7 on his neck here.” The bird tapped the right side of his neck with a clawed finger. One of the lost legion indeed. The Irchtani shuddered. “It is not right. Eating one of you. You are not food.” It was strangely comforting hearing that from another xenobite.

I risked a second look. The man’s eyeless sockets watched me upside down from the dining slab. The rest of the face was untouched as yet. One of the Cielcin had gone for the eyes out of preference. Because it liked them. I turned away, and remember now as I write these words the way the fellow’s one remaining hand had reached out for help that would never come.

“Torch it all,” I said to the soldier. “They’ll have no more of him.” Then over my communicator, I said, “Pallino, where are you?”

“Nearly there, Had. What’s the matter?”

“We found our missing soldiers.”

---

“Those doors won’t open?” Pallino asked, gesturing at the heavy bulkheads at the end of the plaza. “Airlock?”

“Looks like it,” Siran said, and by the odd tilt of her head I guessed she was panning through the three-dimensional map of the tunnel system on her helmet’s entoptics. “You could try cutting through it, Had.”

The thought had already occurred to me, and I nodded. We were wasting time. We’d been aboard the ship already for the better part of an hour. The Mintaka was still in enemy hands. But our men were still sweeping the area around us—the neighborhood, I supposed it was. I misliked the idea of cutting through the door. Any door I cut open could not be closed again, and I could think of a hundred reasons why it should stay closed, but beyond that door was a massive empty space—only hinted at by the mapping drone’s sonar pulses, since it hadn’t found a way through.

A hold.

The whole rear section of the Cielcin vessel—the part that extended behind the hollowed-out moon for half a hundred miles—seemed to wrap itself around this central hold. “If our ships are still anywhere,” I said, and pointed, “they’re through those doors.”

“We can try and find another way around,” Udax suggested.

Pallino was well ahead of us. As chiliarch he could broadcast to every soldier in our strike force—just as I could—and that was precisely what he did. “Has anyone found a way into the central hold? Over.”

A moment passed. “No, sir.”

“Not here.”

“Negative.”

It made sense. “That space is too big,” I said. “They won’t have filled it with air. All the doors are sealed.” And we didn’t know a thing about Cielcin computational devices.

“We could just blow the door,” Pallino suggested.

“Same problem as my cutting through it,” I said. “The minute there’s a leak here other doors will shut behind us. They won’t risk all the air getting out.” I keyed my terminal to signal only the men in my group and Pallino’s and Udax’s auxiliaries. “Spread out, search the levels. There ought to be an emergency hatch. Might be all mechanical in case of power failure. Double quick!”

As I watched the soldiers all hurried about their work. I watched them go, both with my eyes and on the map, tracking beacons showing each man and Irchtani as a blue point against the red wire-frame of the ship map. Absurdly, I thought of the bees in the Tamerlane’s hydroponics section. Changing topics, I rounded on Pallino. “Are we nearer wiping out any of their critical systems?”

“If it’s built like the other ones, Cade’s boys should be near the warp cores.”

“Not yet, then,” I mused. “Siran, order the rest of your century up here, fast as they can. We’re spread a bit thin at the moment.” I thought of the dead man again and his empty eyes. I shut my own, glad my face was hid behind the mask. We were going to find worse before we made it out of here, I just knew it. I had seen some of the footage from our suit cams when Crim’s team planted the bombs on Ulurani’s ship. The bodies, the shrines made of bone. The ietumna inferiors scarred and mutilated to make them more attractive to their akaranta masters.

How had I ever believed that peace was possible?

“There’s some kind of access tunnel up here, chiliarch!” came one of the soldiers’ voices over the comm. “The door’s small. Got some kind of wheel-lock. If I’m reading the map right, looks like it goes through to the hold.”

Pallino and Siran both looked at me. “Just like you said,” Siran said.

I shrugged. “Even I get lucky sometimes.”

“Yeah! It’s an airlock! Won’t fit more than five or six at a time.”

“Very good,” I said in answer, checking the man’s location on the map. “Everyone, up to the third level! Move it!” A thought occurred to me and I grabbed the Irchtani captain by his feathered shoulder. “Udax, if we’re right . . . there’s no air out there.” The bird did not seem to understand. I thought I heard it click its beak through the suit mask. “Will you and your men be able to breathe?”

The Irchtani centurion shrugged my hand away. “Little air at home in sky,” it said. “Vacuum no problem.” It tapped its mask with a claw. “Have air. Rest no problem.” Then it shouldered its plasma rifle on its strap and hurried on. I caught Pallino watching me and sensed that the fellow was raising his eyebrows. Though he could not see my face either, I raised mine, and got the sense that he’d understood.

The door was what I’d expected: a pill-shaped hatch with a strangely human-looking wheel-lock in the center. The men had opened it, revealing a small, round-chambered airlock with an identical door on the far side and a single lever on the wall coated in phosphorescent paint. Cielcin space suits hung in niches on the wall just outside the first door, their faceless visors watching us, their too-long arms hanging limp.

“Tenner’s gone through already,” said one of the men as we approached.

“It’s a hold, all right,” came another voice on the comm—presumably that of the soldier, Tenner. “Dark as all hell, though.”

Pallino interrupted, “Any sign of the ships, man?”

“Not just here, but this place is massive. Must go on for miles.”

“We need to get on through,” I said. “At the very least, we’ll have a straight shot to the rear. We can join Cade’s men shutting down their warp cores.”

That was precisely what we did. I stood by in the hall while we began cycling our men through the airlock in groups of five. As I’d hoped, the entire system was mechanical, with the single lever filling or emptying the airlock by turns. Pallino went first, joining his man Tenner on the far side. Five men passed through, then ten. Fifteen. We were sixty.

We were wasting too much time.

“Valka.” I keyed over to our private line. “What’s your position?”

Her voice was an unspeakable relief in that dark place. “Nearly in orbit around the enemy ship,” she said. “What’s going on in there?”

“They ambushed us,” I said, “but we’re fine. Took a few losses, but I think we’re nearing their central hold.” My voice came out brittle, strangely hollow as I added, “We found the missing men. Or . . . we found one of them. They’re definitely here.”

Her answer—when it came—was a single, small word. “Dead?”

“Half-eaten.”

She swore in her native Panthai. “Anaryoch.”

Barbarians. For once, I agreed with her. It was strange hearing her apply that same curse to the Cielcin—the one she so often applied to me. I tried not to dwell on it.

Clang.

Something hollow and metallic rang in the darkness, and with several of the others I raised my torch to illuminate the hall. Was there something there? But it was only one of our scouts returning. Nearly half our number had gone through the airlock and were waiting on the far side, but I’d left men posted at the end of the hall and on the terrace overlooking the alien square. They were pulling back, moving with clockwork precision to the orders of their decurions.

“That’s all the birdos through,” came the voice of one of the more junior officers at my side. “Lord Marlowe, you’re next.” He raised a hand to usher me through.

I put a hand on the man’s arm. “I’ll wait ’til the last. Call the scouts back.”

The man broke off to do as he was told. “One-two, one-seven: pull back to the airlock. Repeat: pull back to the airlock. That goes double for you, oh-six.” I heard words of assent crackle over the line. Two voices. “Oh-six? Oh-six, do you copy?”

Silence.

Clang.

Somewhere on the levels below we heard the faint bump and grind of metal on stone. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

“The hell was that?” the junior officer asked.

Valka’s voice sounded in my ear. “What’s going on?”

I didn’t answer her.

“Send more of the men through,” I said. “Now.” Something had happened to oh-six, that much was clear.

Clang. Clang-clang.

“There’s something out there,” the junior man said.

“Form a line!” I said. “Cross the hall!” As I spoke the inner door of the airlock slammed shut and I just barely heard the whoosh of air as the men inside pulled the lever. At least the thing cycled quickly. There were perhaps twenty of us left on the inside by then. Perhaps less. I tapped my sword hilt anxiously against my thigh. To the junior man, I said, “Take two and stand at the end of the hall. I want eyes out there.” The hall was not long. Fifty feet perhaps to the far end and the terrace overlooking the square. If anything was to come at us down the hall they’d be up against our guns, but we were pinned against the airlock, bottlenecked by it.

The men hurried to obey, footsteps rebounding off steel and naked stone.

Clang-clang. Clang.

A small voice whispered in my ear, and I said, “Those are footsteps.”

I was half right, as Fate would have it.

I have a clear vision still of that moment: the junior officer and his trias standing in the circular arch at the end of the hall, backlit by our suit lights, framed against the dark. I remember the pop of the airlock’s inner door behind me and the hushed jostling of men as they hurried to fill it. There were just over a dozen of us left, and but for their motions there was nothing to hear save the ragged winds that pulsed through the alien ship like breath through the alveolae of some impossibly giant lungs. Somewhere, distantly, a gentle stream of water fell as from a stalactite into a pool. It made me think of the caverns beneath the palace of the Undying, of Brethren, and of our necropolis. Of Calagah.

Then two arms descended from the ceiling, white and slender and too long even for one of the Cielcin. They seized the middle soldier and pulled him screaming up into the night. Plasma flashed violet in the blackness, splitting the gloom like a wedge. The other men screamed too and dropped to their knees, firing upward. The metal scraping sound squealed in the darkness, and I cut the volume on my headset as Pallino and Valka and several of the others began asking questions at once.

The screaming stopped, and distantly I heard a thud as of meat and metal wetly striking the floor, and guessed the junior man had fallen. Or been dropped.

“Open the door!” one of the others was shouting, hammering on the airlock door.

“It’s on the ceiling!”

One of the others screamed—and his scream choked off without warning. The line went dead. Plasma flashed again, and between the whine of gunshots I heard a faint scuttling and once more the scrape of metal on stone. Then something huge and horrible fell from the darkness above. Bone-white and hulking, taller than any man and far broader it was, with hunched shoulders and a head lost to shadow. I could hardly get a glimpse of it in the sparse light, though where the light caught it shone with a fire like the light of stars.

For a brief instant, I saw the last of the three soldiers find his feet and bring his plasma rifle to bear. He stood etched against the shadow and his quarry, a pitiful small thing against the Dark and the monster that had emerged from it. His rifle flashed, and for a moment then I beheld the beast clearly. Nearly twice again so tall as a man and armored all in white, its legs bent like a dog’s, its arms—and there were four of them—so long they nearly trailed the ground. And its face! Its face! It wore a horned mask with a hooked visor like the beak of some evil bird, and beneath I saw the silver-glass flash of teeth and knew it had been Cielcin once.

One of those impossible metal arms caught the soldier by the ankle and pulled. He tumbled backward and struck the floor.

“Fire!” I shouted.

But the demon was gone, dragging that last hapless soldier into the night.

Hands were pulling me back, forcing me over the threshold and into the airlock. “You have to go now, lord!” one of the soldiers said.

“We won’t all fit!” said another. “Breda! Take Marlowe and the others and go!” He was one of the decurions. There was a chipped double stripe across the right side of his faceless visor, right below where the eye should be.

The man, Breda, asked, “What about you?”

The decurion checked his rifle. “To the job, man.” And he turned, and four of the others with him. The metallic clanging came once again from the end of the hall, but even by our torchlight I could see nothing. But it was coming. We knew it was coming.

I have grown tired of watching men die.

“Follow us as quickly as you can!” I said.

“Aye, lord!”

Clang.

An awful sound went up, like the high keening of the Cielcin but higher and far louder, undercut by a metallic whine like the noise of turbines spinning up. I heard an awful crash and for an instant I had one final vision of the monster as it lurched into the hall, pulling itself along the passage as though it climbed up a shaft, using the ribbed arches for handholds to keep its too-tall body parallel to the floor.

Someone slammed the airlock and pulled the lever. Air roared out, and I could hear the sounds of shouting over the comm and—through the bulkhead and the vibrations in my feet—I felt the shock of gunfire.

Then nothing.

“It won’t fit through here,” one of the others said.

The airlock door dented inward, struck by one of the beast’s mighty fists. Each of us jumped, and an instant later the rear door opened onto the vessel’s central hold.

“Out!” I said, “Out now! Fuse the outer hatch!”

“It’ll let the air out!” one of the others said, staggering out after me.

“It doesn’t need air!” I snarled.

When the last of us was over the threshold, two of the men turned and—using their rifles—welded the outer door of the airlock shut. I could still feel the drumming, hammering of the alien fists against the inner door. Surely it could have turned the wheel? Or was it only angry that we had gone where it could not follow?

The hammering stopped.

“What happened, Had?” asked Pallino, pushing his way through the ranks toward me.

“What the hell was that?” asked one of the others.

My mind was still with the decurion and the others who had stayed behind to cover our escape. It took Valka to shake me loose, her voice in my ear. “Hadrian.” She repeated the other man’s question, “What happened? What was that?”

“That,” I cleared my throat and—answering both her and the others—said, “was one of the demons of Arae.”