“DO YOU THINK THEY made it out?”

“Hope they stuck the bastard good and clean.”

“Did you see its fangs?”

“Keep moving,” Pallino said, waving our men down the line.

The space about us was so vast I could not see the ceiling or the far wall. Darkness deeper than the void’s endless day filled the hold, and the faint red sconces that lined the wall shone so faintly to our human eyes that they might have been mere candle flames. And the quiet . . . there was no air in that vast hold, and so that space—which should have echoed with the sound of feet and shouting—was silent as a funeral, save for the muddy reverberations that rose up through our bones.

A great chasm lay open at our right side, thousands of feet deep. Catwalks and bridges vanished across it, and stairs rose and descended alongside rough cage-lifts and mighty chains. By our torchlight I beheld more catwalks rising in the night, not straight but twisted like the minds of the creatures that built them.

The mapping drones hadn’t pierced this far into the vessel, and so all we had to go by was a muddy sonar scan that depicted a blurry, empty space a dozen miles long or more. The sounds of fighting came over the comm. I only caught one word in seven through the radio hiss.

“Pinned down in sector C7!”

“Enemy presence near the starboard engine cluster!”

“They’re coming through the walls!”

“Do you think there are more of that thing?” Siran asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, lingering a moment to allow the Irchtani to catch up. They could not fly where there was no air, and their short legs did not bend easily. They hopped along like grounded birds in our wake, swords and firearms clasped in scaled hands. “But we should be prepared.”

Siran bobbed her head in short agreement. “Pal’s got the word out to the centurions. They know it’s out there.”

“Good,” I said. The last thing we needed was one of the other groups blindsided by a similar ambush. “I suppose we should be grateful it came for us first.” No sooner had the words escaped me than another, darker thought occurred. But why did it come for us out of all our battle groups? Because we were deepest into the Cielcin vessel? Or because we were near to something precious?

Or worse: had it come for me, personally?

I felt the weight of Siran’s eyes on me. She alone had stood with me on Arae, she alone had seen one of these Pale beasts before. I opened my mouth to respond, but before I could a voice crackled over the officers’ channel, drawn and thin. “We’ve located the fuel reservoirs. We’re going in.” It was Cade, one of Pallino’s other centurions.

“Good!” Pallino answered. “Lock it down, man. Earth guard you.”

“And you.”

I remembered the fate of the Androzani, or of Prince Ulurani’s vessel. We might do the same here. More importantly, we might prevent the Cielcin from detonating their own ship if they had a mind.

The grim thought was pushed out of my mind a moment later, for one of the scouts Pallino had run ahead called back over the line, “Sir! I’ve got something up ahead.”

“What is it?” I demanded.

Recognizing my palatine accent over the line, the man swallowed audibly. “A ship, my lord. One of ours.”

I’d pressed forward through the others and so came to the place where the scout stood by the rail, torch beams pointed up along a rickety stair toward a shape hanging in the night. The hard edges and geometric lines were as alien in that alien place of ribbed arches and organic curves as Tanaran had been on the bridge of the Mistral so long ago. But there it was. The blackened hull of an Imperial starship yawned out of the night above us.

“Find a way up!” I gave the order. “Quickly now! Double time!” We had to know, had to be certain these were the lost ships and that the men aboard were truly dead.

Valka’s voice crackled in my ear. “Did you find them?” she asked.

I watched our scouts hurry up the steps in groups of three, answered, “We found a ship. Not sure if it’s one of the missing ones or some other. We’ll know soon.”

“We’ll be in orbit soon.”

“Shields are holding?”

“They are.”

“Tell Aristedes to concentrate fire on the forward section. We should be safe here and it may distract them.” There was nothing on the other line a moment, and I said, “Valka?”

She answered almost at once, “He heard you.”

“Lord Marlowe!” The voice of one of the legionnaires cut over whatever else Valka might have said. “We found a hatch.”

---

The airlock had been forced long ago. Deep scratches ran along the edges of the doorway, as if some mighty beast had carved the door from the hull with impossibly strong fingers. The inner door was the same. All was dark within, save where the emergency lighting strips glowed near the floor like the last embers of a dying fire. I ran my fingers over the plaque welded along the inside of the bulkhead, feeling the letters raised there.

ISV Merciless.

The Merciless. She’d been shown no mercy, in the end. That much was certain. The deckplates in the hall beyond were scuffed and scraped-over, a sure sign that someone or something had dragged heavy equipment through.

“We found them,” I said to everyone and no one. I could hardly believe it. I had expected to return to Forum with nothing.

Valka’s bright voice slashed into me. “We’ve not found them yet.”

Her words pushed me over the threshold into the darkened ship. She was right. We had to know, had to be certain the men had not all found themselves on some other communal dining slab. The overhead lights flickered on, responding to our presence. Loose wires hung from a place in the ceiling ahead, casting their hangman’s shadows along the corridor walls.

“Pallino, secure the bridge,” I said, stepping round the wires. “And send a team to the engine room. I want to know if she’s still spaceworthy. Udax, have your men secure the hull. I don’t want any surprises.”

“Sir?” Udax tilted his head, inquiring.

“We’ll need to fly her out of here sooner or later,” I said, and pushed past the feathered auxiliary toward the maw of an access corridor that ran deeper into the captured ship. Much of my adult life I’d spent aboard Imperial battleships. I knew the shape of them, and though I’d never been aboard the Merciless before, nor any ship of her class, I knew the way, down five levels and forward to the place beneath the bridge where the ship’s cargo—its complement of soldiers—slept their sleep of the dead.

Or should have slept. As I hurried forward I saw once more the body of the man on the alien table. I told myself that if even one man were yet alive, it would be enough. Enough to have saved him and to have rid the galaxy of the monsters that had taken his fellows.

I had to know.

The cubiculum was right where I’d thought to find it: in a hold far up and to the rear of the ship. We passed through an interior airlock to find it, and as I stepped across that frigid threshold I keyed my wrist-terminal and the hard switch at the base of my skull that opened my helmet. The mask broke apart; the cowl and broad flange that protected my neck folded and stowed themselves in the collar. I shook my hair free, the sweat cold against my skin. My breath misted the air.

I regretted my choice at once.

“What in Earth’s holy name is that smell?” Siran asked. She’d removed her own helmet.

She knew full well what it was, we both did. We had seen enough battlefields, even burned cities. Enough of Death’s red train. The fugue creches rose all around us, honeycombing the walls: rank upon rank, column upon column of hexagonal ports behind which a man might lie. The Merciless held just over nine thousand men, for it was far smaller than the Tamerlane. They’d been packed on ice like salt fish, never intended to be pulled from their berths for deployment in transit, never intended to awaken until they reached Nemavand. Many would not awaken at all. Rusty stains and blue ones marred the scuffed and badly scarred floor. Blood and cryonic suspension fluid mingled on the deck plates, their colors strangely muted beneath the stark, white lights.

Many a cask stood open. Shattered glass and busted components still littered the floor. The xenobites had not bothered to clear it. Medical hoses and catheters and the tangled wires from electrodes hung here and there from the gutted fugue pods like the intestines of dead machines, and I knew full well whence that poor fellow from the dining slab had come. I crouched to examine the nearest open pod.

“Where’s the blood?” one of the soldiers asked, voice thin in the cold air.

I glanced up at him through dark hair. I did not know the voice. One of Pallino’s men, then? I didn’t know most of the soldiers beneath the first century of the First Cohort. “You must be new,” I said, and hoped the words were without malice or condescension. The man nodded, but hung his masked head all the same. When he said nothing, I said, “The Pale flush the cryo-fluid out before they pull the bodies. They don’t care if the bastard’s alive or not. They’re just hungry.” I clenched my teeth around the final word and straightened.

“They’ll wait just long enough to flush the TX9 out,” Siran added.

“Found bodies, sir!” came a call from the next aisle over.

Or what was left of them . . . The men lay rotted and half-eaten in the aisle, limbs twisted, bones gray in the stark light.

“What did they do with the heads?” one man asked, for they were missing.

One of the Irchtani who was still with me made a low croaking sound. “This is no way to treat an enemy.”

“There are as many still living as not, lord,” said one of the men, examining the sleeper casks along the wall. “They took them at random.”

I said nothing, but stood with my head bowed over the ruined, rotting corpses at my feet. I stifled the urge to cover my face, to don my mask again. I had to see. The man was right. There were still dozens of fugue creches left undisturbed. Hundreds. The units were designed to preserve power even if the ship was failing; they could last decades—as I supposed they had.

“Pallino.” I held my wrist to my face and turned away. “We found them.”

“Alive?” The word came through the conduction tape behind my ear, cool and clear as if the man were standing next to me.

“A number of them. Maybe even most. The Pale have been pulling them out as needed.” It was an efficient form of piracy, I supposed. They could live fat off their last catch—literally—while they awaited the next. “How’s the ship?”

“They drained the fuel reservoirs, warp and sub-light, but the emergency batteries are still holding. Life support’s in the blue. Emergency air looks fine.”

No surprises there. The Cielcin were not stupid. They’d not want to sit atop several hundred kilograms of untapped antilithium any more than a human commander would. They’d either drained it into their own reservoir or vented the volatile antimatter into space.

“Weapon systems?”

Pallino was a moment responding. I heard him bark queries to his men and wait for answers I did not hear. “Knocked out, mostly. Looks like hull defense guns are intact, but the big stuff’s gone. MAG drivers, missiles, all gone.” As if to underscore his words, the vessel shook beneath us and a sound like distant thunder rolled. The Tamerlane must have begun shelling the planetoid end of the Cielcin ship.

“What about beam weapons?”

“I’m not sure. Hardware looks intact, but . . .”

“Find out for me,” I said, still holding my left wrist to my face.

“My lord!”

There was something in the tone of that soldier’s voice—I could not tell if he was summoning me or swearing. I dropped my wrist and Pallino with it, though I could still hear my chiliarch speaking in my ear. I followed the voice around a bend in the aisle and stopped dead. I felt my eyes widen and my gorge rise and strain against my teeth, but I choked it down. Spat.

A bank of computer consoles ran along the far end of the cubiculum, touch-panels and holographs monitoring the thousands of men who lay interred in that frigid mausoleum of the undead, but I did not see them. There was an empty space arrayed between the consoles and the ends of the long, tall aisles of honeycombed sleepers, five yards across. Five rolling lifters meant for transporting the fugue creches stood berthed to one side, and in the middle . . .

 . . . in the middle.

There is a legend which holds that Earth—in her antiquity—was not one world but two. Indeed the oldest maps show two globes side by side, with the old world of Rome and Baghdad and Qin on one side and the unmapped terra incognita on the other, the two halves joined by a narrow band of sea. I suspect this is only symbolic, for surely the Earth is—whatever the Chantry teaches—only a planet like all the others. Nevertheless, it is said that men found the narrow way and the new world beyond. They sailed for gods and for want of gold and—as I have mentioned before—the dream of eternal youth, though such was not to be found on Earth’s waters. But in time they came to a city on a lake, greater by far than any city they had seen, but a city of horrors. The men who dwelt there fed on human children and offered victims to the sky.

I felt something of the horror those ancient explorers felt on finding that blood-soaked city then. As they had stood in the heart of that awful city and seen the ruins of sacrifice, I stood before a similar sort of monument.

We had found the missing heads.

In the open space before the consoles, the Cielcin had raised a black monument of their own. Twenty feet high it stood, and wide at its base as three men were tall.

It was built all of bones. Level upon level of human skulls stood in rings set with tender care, bits of hair and skin still hanging from them, brown stains of long-dry blood thin upon their cracked and yellow surfaces. Metal rods held the skulls in place, and ropes of the alien silk were intricately tied. The hollow eyes stared outward all around, eternally watchful. There must have been hundreds of them to construct such a monument. Strips of cloth fluttered from the silk cords, painted with Cielcin glyphs. I could not read them, but I was reminded of the paper prayer cards that hung from the branches of the trees in Kharn’s Garden.

Prayer cards.

What gods could such creatures pray to?

I knew the answer to that. The Cielcin worshiped the Quiet, in whose ruined halls and tunnels they had first evolved, arising from a species of predator that lived in the dark beneath their homeworld’s radiation-bathed surface.

“They will die for this,” I swore, and clenched my fists. “By Earth, I swear it.” And for the first time in my life, I think I truly meant that oath. By Earth. “How many are left?”

One of my soldiers skirted the evil monument and accessed the consoles on the far side. “Just over seven thousand,” he said.

Seven thousand. Nearly two thousand dead, then. I tried to tell myself this was good news, but the skulls still watched me with eyes unblinking in their mute accusation.

You are too late, they said.

Too late.

The ship shook again beneath us, and shook me from my mood. Holding my terminal to my face I looked away from the tower of bones. “Valka, what’s going on?”

“They’ve disabled the Mintaka’s engines,” she said, voice tight.

“When?” I practically shouted. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

She hissed, and I forced my eyes shut to quiet my breathing and the fast-again beating of my heart. “Five minutes ago,” she replied, all business. “Verus is fighting them in the halls.”

“Then we haven’t much time.” I nearly spat the words, changed channels. “Cade! Give me some good news!”

The centurion’s voice came back. “Can’t, lord! We’re pinned down. I think we’ve located the vent controls for the fuel tanks but there are about a hundred of them between us and the target. They know what we’re up to.”

“Is the chimera with them?”

“The Exalted, sir? No, sir. But I’m not sure we can get through. We’ve lost . . . nineteen.” He paused just long enough to check the count in his heads-up display. “We’re outnumbered.”

I swore. “Pallino!”

“I heard!”

“How fast can we get reinforcements to Cade’s century?”

“I can have the seventh there in twenty minutes? Twenty-five? They’re closest.”

It wasn’t soon enough. Twenty minutes may as well have been twenty years. But I clenched my jaw and—channeling Captain Corvo—said, “See it done.” I took one whole step before a thought occurred to me, and I asked, “Pallino, what’s the status on those beam weapons?”

The chiliarch was a moment replying—I imagined him asking his underlings on the bridge. “Techs say the primary starboard gun’s still intact. We’ve got a shot long as the batteries hold.”

I was nodding. The Merciless had two five-terawatt lasers, each one powerful enough to level a city block. The weapons were of little use against shielded targets, but against unshielded foes? They could destroy a target faster than they could react, making them the ideal first assault weapon of choice in any ship-to-ship ambush.

An ambush was something like what I had in mind.

“You want us to fire in here?” Pallino asked. “Are you insane?”

Valka’s voice chimed in, “Hadrian! Have you completely lost your mind? What if you hit one of the other ships? If there’s any AM fuel still on board . . .”

“Then have Aristedes pick us a target very carefully. Feed the vector through to Pallino.”

“This’ll call them on down on us, Had,” Pallino said, communicating over the officers’ private channel. “We’ll be surrounded in here.”

“That’s what I’m counting on,” I said. “It just might give Cade a chance to get through to the fuel tanks. We have to keep them from warping out with us aboard.”

Valka cut in, “I don’t like this at all.”

“Noted,” I said, and cut the line.

Even across thousands of miles of space and meters of steel and stone, I thought I could hear her swear. Barbarian.

Only if it fails.

I was hurrying from the cubiculum already, pulling the elastic coif back over my head and hair and donning my helmet. The casque closed about my face like the shell of some black scarab over its delicate wings. I ran as if I had wings of my own, barreling ahead of my guards down the hall. There were just under a hundred of us aboard the Merciless, men and Irchtani. Even with the ship’s hull defense weapons, I didn’t like our chances, but I liked our chances less if Cade failed.

That was the time for decisive action.

I burst onto the bridge a moment later, passing safely through another inner airlock. The chamber was dim and low-ceilinged, with the usual glossy black and brass shine of any Imperial vessel. Voice amplified by speakers in my suit’s chest, I said, “Pallino, post men on the exterior guns. I want to be ready; do we have that shot vector from Aristedes?”

“Just got it,” Pallino said, unwilling to argue with me where his subordinates could hear.

“Get ready to fire on my mark,” I said, then pivoting to our group channel asked, “Udax, are all ingress points secured?”

“Yes.” The bird said no more.

To everyone aboard the Merciless I said, “Be ready to fall back on the inner airlocks. Defend the bridge, life support, and the cubiculum. Let’s try and bottleneck them, keep them on as few approaches as we can. Hold out until Cade can vent their warp cores and until reinforcements get here.” I rounded on Pallino, “Ready?”

Switching to his private line, the other man asked, “Can I say no?”

“No.”

Pallino paused a moment before replying. “Then yes.” He switched back to his suit speakers, old soldier’s voice filling the room like a trumpet blast. “Prepare to fire on my order!” He leaned over the central console, hands gripping the edges of the display. I watched the techs busy themselves obeying the order, watched the tactical display plot the strike. Aristedes had picked his target simply enough: he’d pointed the ship’s lone laser cannon directly forward, back along the length of the vessel toward the bulbous front end, toward the bulk of the inhabited sections of the worldship. Our men were all around and to the rear.

No subtlety at all, I remember thinking. The bastard may as well have pointed a cannon at the deck.

“Fire.”

There was no light, no cough or rattle of machinery. No recoil, no shuddering beneath our feet. Miles away at the end of the hold, a bright light flared and smoked down to naught. Ten seconds passed in silence. Only then did the ship quake beneath us, following the flash of secondary explosions that heralded the destruction of other systems deeper in the Cielcin vessel.

“Can we fire again?”

One of the soldiers checked the readouts. “No, my lord. The batteries were near drained as was. It’s a miracle we got one shot off.”

“No matter,” I said. “We’ve done enough . . .” I trailed off, listening through the echoing quiet, as though I might discern the distant tramp of clawed feet. I heard nothing, but knew all the same.

I knew they were coming.