“PALLINO, YOU HAVE THE bridge.”

“Where are you going?” The chiliarch’s words floated after me as I made for the door to the hall.

I stopped, hand hovering just above the door controls. “You heard that thing crawling around on the hull same as me. How long before it gets in through one of the dorsal hatches?”

“Our boys sealed those up!” Pallino shot back.

I shook my head furiously. “It won’t matter.” Earth and Empire knew what sort of kit the chimera had concealed in its body. After the Battle of Arae, the dozen or so intact—but dead—failures the MINOS scientists had created were examined by Legion Intelligence. The demons of Arae had been crafted for war, their bodies augmented with plasma burners in the wrist and shoulders and nerve disruptors in the palms. Ceramic blades lay concealed within each of the chimeras’ arms, and an assortment of explosives, projectile weapons, and other, nastier surprises were doubtless secreted on the creature’s body. And those had only been the prototypes. What Iubalu of the Iedyr Yemani had to hand who could say?

Not I, but I would face it anyway.

“Had,” Pallino said, dropping all rank and formal designation, “stay here.”

I checked the fit of my coif over my forehead, keyed a sequence on my wrist-terminal that desynchronized the device from the holography booth’s projectors. For a moment, I saw my gaunt face reflected in the dull, dark metal of the door. Hollow-eyed, high-cheekboned. I threw the hard switch inside my suit collar, and the helmet components unfurled, opened like a flower and shut about my head. I shut my eyes a moment—just long enough to avoid the familiar panic as all that titanium and black ceramic closed over my face.

Momentarily blind, I punched the door controls. An instant later my suit’s entoptics flickered on; projectors aimed at my eyes showed me my men standing guard in the hall, the wreckage of a dozen or so nahute at their feet. I saw my reflection at the end of the hall, black mask and black armor, the white cape hanging limp in the still air. All turned to look at me, blank white arcs of ceramic where their faces ought to be. Reaching up, I unclasped my cape and tossed it at one of the men, who caught it clumsily. “Siran, with me.”

She didn’t ask questions. Not in front of the men.

“Malag, take command,” she said to her optio. The fellow saluted.

While this changing of the guard was happening, I gestured to a knot of three men standing to the front and left of the little knot. “You’re a trias?” I asked. Their triaster nodded. “Good. You come, too.” And then I began walking, sword unkindled in my hand. As I walked, I signaled, “Udax. Report.”

The Irchtani centurion almost shouted over the line, making me wince, “We’re losing the port side! Your men aren’t getting through fast enough!”

“Then blow the port gangway. Pull your men back to the inner airlocks. Are you there?”

“Aye!” Udax replied. “But if we cut them off from the ship, I don’t know what they’ll do next.”

“We’ll worry about that later! Do as I say, man!”

Something thundered in the distance, a great clamor like the crash of a bus through a crowded storefront. I expected alarms to sound, but the Merciless was so badly damaged she could not even muster up the energy to scream.

“He’s here,” I said.

“Who’s here?” Siran asked.

“Our friend from the tunnel.”

I fancied I could hear the color drain from Siran’s face as she asked, “The demon?”

“Be on your guard,” I said, and turning to her raised a fist. “With me now?”

My centurion and faithful armsman nodded and knocked my fist with her own. “Just another Colosso match, eh?”

“Just another day,” I said. “Come on.”

As my little unit pounded up the corridor, I tracked the sounds of fighting in the halls below. The cough of plasma fire echoed through the ship and men’s cries resounded on the line.

“Enemy in the hold!”

“Contact! Contact!”

“Gods in hell, the size of him!”

“O Mother, deliver us . . .”

Screams.

Then another voice whispered in my ear, high and cold and entirely too close. “Come out! Come out, hurati. Where are you hiding?” The others froze. They had not been on the bridge. They had not heard. The Cielcin spoke Galstani, its affect flat and unfeeling, the product—I guessed—of its machine design. Just as Kharn Sagara had spoken through his machines, the xenobite general spoke with a voice not its own.

“It can hear every word we’re saying,” I said, horror blossoming in me. “It must have hacked the comms.”

“You cannot hide forever,” the vayadan said. “I will find you.”

“Can we lock it out?” Siran asked.

A more pressing question occurred to me, but I did not voice it. Can it access the Tamerlane? Rather than answer her question—for fear of being overheard—I answered, “We need to move quickly.”

---

The doors to the hold had been left open when the Cielcin pillaged the vessel. The air had gone, and much of what had been inside was lost and taken away. Loose cables sparked from the high ceiling, and the bodies of dead men—our men—lay strewn on the floor.

They’d been torn apart, and their still-warm blood boiled in the vacuum, orange fading to gold on my suit’s infrared. To pale blue.

“Where did it go?” one of the men asked.

“Not far,” came the alien reply, whispered in our each and every ear. “Not far. Not far.” Still it spoke the tongues of men, spoke that my men might understand and so fear it.

Remembering the way it had attacked our men in the hall by the dormitory block, I cast my eyes upward, expecting to see the beast crawling spider-like along the ceiling, hands and feet magnetized or perhaps clawed onto the roof. But there were only the fingered shadows of catwalks and crane gantries criss-crossing the dark above like a smaller version of the alien hold outside.

“I want to get a look at you,” it said, and I sensed that it was speaking to me. It confirmed this suspicion a moment later, saying, “Killed Otiolo, did you? And Ulurani? You are smaller than I expected—but then your kind are so small.”

I took a few steps away from our group, careful to keep my thumb on the trigger to kindle my blade. “You serve Dorayaica?”

“The Makers lit the stars for him, yukajji. They burn so that you might see what he achieves.”

“We’ll see,” I said.

Iubalu’s voice sounded in my ear, and beneath it I thought I heard the distant tapping of metal on metal carried through the bones of the ship, barely discernible beneath the sounds of gunfire and battle above and around us. “He will light your worlds on fire. He will drink their blood!”

With any luck, Udax would join us soon. “Show yourself, creature!” I said. The memory of the tower of bones still blazed in me, of the man on the dining slab. Tired as I was, anger animated me. I was ready.

“We had hoped there would be more of you coming, but even I did not dare hope it would be you.” The vayadan’s voice dripped venom like snowmelt. “He has long desired you for his collection, Devil of Meidua.”

I felt a chill steal down my spine, and almost kindled my blade. But that was fear talking. I could not afford fear in that moment. I had fought one of these demons before, on Arae, but it had been a crippled thing: only somewhat functional. Here we faced a monster in the fullness of its strength. I remembered the Exalted, Calvert, in the dungeons of the Undying. How fast he had moved, faster than my human reflexes could track.

We need to get it back into the halls, I thought. I could not afford to speak the words, lest it hear us. It will kill us in the open. Keeping to the wall of the hold, I moved toward one of the many side entrances. The way to the cubiculum was through there, by many winding passages. Some of our men were there, guarding our living dead in their icy coffins. The reinforcements would be of some help. But we had to get there. Coming down to the hold had been an error, and I’d allowed myself to be lured by the death cries of the men that had been in that place.

But we had a chance . . . so long as it kept talking.

“What does he want with me?”

Cold laughter sounded over the line, and again I heard the faint tapping of metal claws. I cast my eyes around again. There was nothing. Not in visible light or infrared. Whatever the Extrasolarians had done to the vayadan, it no longer glowed with the heat of living fire.

It may as well be dead, I thought. And I fancied a chorus of voices answered me from my depths. Undead. Undead. Undead.

The tapping sounded again, and I had visions of the thing crawling on the walls like some pale spider, or else lurking behind the heavy loading equipment where it sat bracketed to the floor.

“Want with you?” the Cielcin general echoed. “You are his enemy! He wants to break you. And to thank you.”

“Thank me?” I gestured to Siran and the others to fall behind me, to keep their backs to the wall as they pivoted to take up positions nearer the door. “Thank me for what?”

“You have destroyed two of his enemies. Shortened the path to his goal.”

Two? I was being slow. “Otiolo and Ulurani?”

“He will be Aeta Ba-Aetane, the first since Elu brought us to the stars.”

“Aeta Ba-Aetane,” I repeated. “The Prince of Princes?” There was a chilling thought. If the Cielcin clans could unite with a common purpose and strategy, the war would become hell. For the moment, the disparate clans pillaged where they would, burned worlds and took slaves as they wished. For the Legions, it was like rushing to put out fires as they were lit against a city palisade . . . but only one fire at a time, or two. United, the clans could burn the stars.

I remembered Carax of Aramis, then, him and the Pale King he’d met above Hermonassa.

A crown, he’d said. A crown? Yes. It were silver.

I saw once again the silver-crowned demon from my visions, him with the host of monsters at his back and the galaxy burned behind him. No doubt remained in my mind that he was Syriani Dorayaica, the Scourge of Earth.

“He is Shiomu,” Iubalu said.

“The Prophet?” I asked.

“He knows the future!” the vayadan general intoned. “He has spoken with the Watchers! With the great ones who dwell in the night!”

“The Quiet?” I asked, stepping forward back into the hold.

A bolt of violet light split the darkness, which closed behind like the crashing of the sea.

Whirling, I saw one of my men had fired at the roof above. His plasma burner was still smoking in the thin air. “Hold your fire!” I said.

Something scraped in the vaults above, and the words came in our ears, taunting, “You missed me, hurati.”

Asking in Cielcin so I knew I would not be misunderstood, I asked, “Dein belutono ba-Caihanarin ne?”

What do you know about the Watchers? The Quiet?

“Speak not their name!” the vayadan shrieked.

The sky fell an instant later. There came a flash of red light and an instant after a mighty crash sounded. On instinct I kindled my blade and swept the point forward in anticipation of my leaping foe. But when the flash cleared and the ringing faded to silence, I saw it was only the wreckage of one of the cranes. Three of my men turned and fired up into the tangle of catwalks and gantries, the flash of their guns lighting up the gloom.

But there was nothing to shoot at. Nothing above.

One of the maintenance grates beside us exploded, metal grillwork snarling upward. Before I could process what was happening, a white blur erupted from beneath us and something swept down upon my men. My eyes were an instant catching up. The blur was Iubalu. I had a faint moment of reflection, realizing that if one of these chimeric demons had come for Cade and his men, as well, there was more than one aboard. I saw its arm, white as Death, saw the long blade extruded from its wrist, the clawed finger folded down and out of the way. The stunned hoplite just stood there, shoulders tight, unmoving.

The creature had moved so fast the shield had blocked a sword strike. We stood there a moment, humans and Pale machine alike: a grim burlesque tableau. For an instant. No one moved. No one dared to.

But the moment passed. Time, Ever-Fleeting, does not stop.

Siran, always cool and level-headed, fired.

The shot flashed in the hall, broke against the alien’s shield with a rippling of fractal light. Shielded, of course the creature was shielded. I felt my teeth clench. Iubalu turned its eyeless head toward Siran and me, black and glassy teeth shining as it leered—and leaped.

“Back!” I shouted, hurling myself aside. Siran had just enough time to pivot behind a stanchion that supported the walkways above. One of Iubalu’s four arms swept in a flat arc, white sword flashing. The zircon blade pinged off the steel and titanium of the stanchion with a bell-like chime, and it extended an identical blade from a second arm, which it hooked round the pillar even as Siran leaped away. Our shields were forcing it to move slower than it could. That was something, but it was something that would matter only so long as our shields held. With a third arm it uncoiled a nahute that hung from its belt and hurled it into the air. Shielded as we were, the drone was not immediately a threat, but it would split our attention at a time when we could not afford distractions. Two of our men circled round behind it, but a port opened in the demon’s shoulder and opened fire. Plasma spat out, tracking the two hoplites even though Iubalu did not turn its head to look. It had eyes all round its head, I realized, and some machine daimon within helped its once-organic consciousness keep track of the images through all those extra eyes. But the plasma broke against our hoplites’ shields, and one drew close enough to get off a shot inside the monster’s energy curtain. It left a black, smoking mark on the white enamel of the creature’s armor. No good.

An instant later Iubalu whirled into a dancing low kick that brought one clawed metal foot up into the man’s chin. I felt rather than heard the man’s neck break as his body was lifted wholly from the floor and flew up and out of sight to strike the distant ceiling. Where he landed I never knew, for a moment later the machine demon spun from its kick into an over-handed punch that flattened the second hoplite, crumpling him like an old can. His suit’s underlayment took the worst of the blow, hardening to protect his organs, but the fellow hit the deck and skidded away forty feet. Fifty.

Snarling, it turned its lidless gaze on me, lips peeling back from dead gums. One metal fist clenched, folded down from the wrist. A blade white and sharp and stinging sprang forth, long as Iubalu’s too-long forearm, long almost as an Irchtani zitraa.

“Shiomu iunane o-okun darathar,” it said. The Shiomu wants you alive. “But he didn’t say I couldn’t break you first.”

The blade moved faster than I could track. Too fast. It pinged off my shield, sending a thunderclap through the thin air of the hold.

Siran shouted something over the line and shots rang out. Plasma broke uselessly over the vayadan’s shields. Only then did I understand her. “Use your lances! Lances!” That made sense. An energy lance’s beam would drain a shield faster than plasma or kinetic weapons ever could.

As if in answer to this, Iubalu’s shoulder gun turned and shot over my head at the men behind me. I’d lost track of the nahute; it must be among the men behind me, or else was circling above. I offered no reply to the Cielcin leader, but thrust at the creature’s midsection. Iubalu pivoted, stepping back, and brushed the blade aside with the edge of its forearm.

Just as I’d feared: its body was adamant, forged of the same long-chain carbon molecules common in starship hulls. Nothing, not even highmatter, could cut it.

That impossibly huge smile widened, and a short rush of air groaned past its teeth. Then it raised its sword arm yet again and swung. Slower now. Slow enough to pass through my shield if it struck me. I ducked, wove under the strike, and swung around to the outside. I kept my sword up as I did so and drew the liquid blue blade across the creature’s white one. Highmatter met ceramic, and my sword sliced the Cielcin’s off near the base, and the white weapon went spinning to clatter against the wall of the hold.

“Hadrian!” Siran’s voice sounded in my ear, “Move!”

Without hesitation I threw myself back toward the wall, putting a good three meters between myself and the demon before I heard the earth-splitting bang of a grenade. Regaining my feet and my composure, I turned to see the cloud of shrapnel and plasma vapor that drifted where the Cielcin machine had been a moment before. I beheld its distended, humanish profile through the mist: four arms long and trailing, its broken sword still hanging from its wrist. Its smile seemed to float out of the fog, teeth shining like a cat’s in some moonlit jungle of human memory.

But for the sword I had taken from it, Iubalu seemed unscathed.

It raised its broken weapon before its face. Surprise? Disbelief? A salute? Or mere detached curiosity? To this day I cannot say. It made a fist, and the white arm released the stump of blade with as little pomp as accompanied the ejection of a plasma burner’s spent heat sink.

“Oyumn juu ne?” it asked. Is that all?

And then it was gone, retreating halfway across the hold in a blur of white motion.

Retreating? Why?

“Back to the hall!” I shouted, retreating toward the archway.

A noise like the clap of thunder on a night of rain sounded just behind me, and I knew. Knew the beast had moved so fast it shocked the air. The third and last man of the trias that had accompanied Siran and me screamed and hit the wall ahead with a slap. Even shielded, being struck by an object so massive as the Cielcin chimera at such speeds would be like having a shuttle dropped on you. The man didn’t even have time to scream.

Though someone did. A moment later a horrid cry went up, filling the air of the hold and our lines alike. I did not have to turn to know. It had been the second man Iabalu had struck. The nahute had found him.

I killed his connection to my suit’s comms.

All three men were dead.

“Siran! Go!” I shouted, pushing her into the hall. “It’s me it wants! Run!”

The lights in the hall sprang on in response to our presence, the odd one sputtering or sparking before it went out. The ship shook beneath us—from the fighting outside or the Tamerlane’s distant shelling I could not say. I slammed the door behind me, but I knew.

Not even four inches of titanium would hold the chimera for long.