ON THE FIELD ABOVE, the battle raged. The colossi—hemmed in by the sinkhole that had swallowed one of their number—retreated and took up a defensive position nearer the Storm Wall itself. They could not risk losing another of the goliath machines. I imagined Lorian grinding his teeth at his display, cursing himself for a fool. It was easy to picture the fellow as a kind of impatient spider, ordering the colossi back to within the protective cordon of the wall and its guns.

The Cielcin, I later learned, had not followed them, finding the Storm Wall’s shields and guns—with their overlapping fields of fire—wholly impenetrable to attack on an open field. Even the nahute kept their distance, or followed their masters down the twin breaches in the tarmac to the terminal halls below.

The black fortress of Dharan-Tun hung above all, the corona of the blackened sun white around its edge. I saw it again before ducking into a side passage after Valka, though at our great distance I little guessed at the dark towers and channels that ran across its surface. The forests of steam-work pipes and oceans of frozen air, the grub farms near the surface where slaves—human and Pale alike—toiled beneath the whip. Nor could I guess at the number of those slaves, nor the torments they endured. And yet they all were there, hidden in the shadow of that eclipse. And there too watched and waited the owner of that White Hand, surveying its triumph.

Syriani Dorayaica.

Valka’s shouting brought me back to myself, and I followed her and Bassander Lin into the side passage. The Mandari captain had come forward with nigh on a thousand men—leaving the collapsed tramways behind them. It was cruel sealing so many people in such cramped quarters. Cruel and desperate, but desperation was not so bad as desertion, as leaving them to die.

We could not hope to win the battle in the fight in the terminal—there were too many. But Bassander’s men had turned the tide for the moment, along with the grenadiers on the flank of the colossus above.

The empty hall echoed to the sounds of our feet, one of the hundreds of similar tunnels the dock workers and starport custodial staff used in maintaining the complex. We hurried on, three men abreast, following the map Lorian had given us.

We had not far to go.

Fifty men had followed us into the tunnel, led by Bassander, Valka, and myself. Pallino had stayed behind with Oro and Doran to command the force in the terminal proper. A silver thread projected on the hall by my suit’s entoptics led the way, around blind corners and down narrower passages toward the place Lorian had marked for us.

Somewhere up ahead was a cargo ship, the Kupari, whose fuel cells—along with a single remote-detonated plasma grenade—would be precisely the thing we needed. It was not the closest ship to the terminal, not by half . . . but it was the closest to the lonely tramway that ran through the undeveloped portion of the landing field toward the port authority watchtowers. The inner bulkhead was open as we approached, and the outer hatch opened on a wheel-lock.

The wind rushed in, whistling over the titanium and the ceramic outer shell. Beyond, white tiles greeted us, dust-streaked and burned black. The Kupari stood above us, a silver finger burned black itself in places, surface ionized and corroded. It looked in every way like one of the rockets of utmost antiquity, red-finned and ice-cauled where the fuel cells were kept cold, their contents held under extraordinary pressure. The cells themselves formed a girdle near the base of the lifter, near the aftermarket repulsor nacelles her owner had welded on to offset some of the payload. She had dozens of them, each about eight feet long and about a cubit in diameter.

“How many do we need?” Lin asked. The cells contained a chemical accelerant that assisted with the primary drive—a primitive, hydrogen-oxygen burning rocket. The Kupari was no interstellar craft, was little more than a surface-to-space freighter, one that would park itself in the hold of some large ship and ride along to its next stop. It was as elementary as rocketry got, riding explosives to the stars.

It was exactly what we needed.

“Four or five should do,” Lorian answered when I repeated the question.

One of the soldiers chipped in, “There should be a float pallet around the bay somewhere, sirs . . .”

“Can we carry them?” Valka asked.

“If we put four or six men on each,” Bassander said, “but that doesn’t leave much for defense if it comes to fighting.”

Pushing past him, I shouted orders at three of the men who’d followed us into the pit, eyes wandering among the gantries and fuel arms attached to the fuselage of the glorified missile in whose shadow we stood. I could not see the sun or the great vessel that blocked it, but so deep in the well of that pit I could see the stars, bright and clear and pure through the lazy coils of cloud.

Turning back to Bassander Lin and to Valka, I said, “Then we had best hope it does not come to fighting.” The thought of a stray shot or sword blow flooding the cramped quarters with chemical accelerant was not a happy one. “Quickly now!” But I had found what I was looking for, and moved toward it. A spout ran along the inside of the pit, shielded from the main shaft behind the inner curve of the artificial crater. The ladder ran up it for more than fifty feet to where the nose cone and upper sections of the Kupari rose above the landing field. It was not a short climb, but we had a moment. Ignoring the chastisement of Valka and my guards at my back, I mounted the first rungs. I knew I could not stand on the surface without risking the attention of the Pale, but I could peer out at the world above.

I reached the top and raised my eyes above the lip of the crater, bracing myself against the far side of the shaft where a carved foothold waited, trying not to think about the fall beneath me. There was the black sun high in the sky above, and there the dark forest of siege towers at one margin of my world. I could not see the blasted nuclear plant so near the ground, nor spy the perimeter towers behind that thicket of evil spires. But I saw the Cielcin plain enough, massing in the shadows of their ships. I hoped I was far off enough not to be a target for the nahute that moved like shoals of fish in the air above them.

Turning my head to look through fields of smoke and smoldering fires, I beheld the burning wreckage of the downed colossus. The fallen colossus—four-legged and with a body like a saucer—lay shattered and burning. Its weight hadn’t broken the vaults of the terminals below. Its fall had. Looking past it to the wall, I could just make out the other platforms standing at attention. Bipeds, tripods, quadrupeds—and the hexapods largest of all. Our iron guardians. I knew plenty of strategoi and logothetes in the Defense Ministry who argued the massive war machines were impractical. Foolhardy. Expensive and impossible to maintain. But one could not deny: they were breathtaking.

The mightiest of these stood easily three hundred feet high, dwarfing the men and smaller tanks that clustered about its legs. Red lights glinted in the narrow slit about its equator from which its drivers watched, weapons at the ready. The Cielcin had given up trying to engage those mighty war machines, seemed clustered instead about the spots where the tarmac had been breached about the smoldering wreckage of the colossus and the alien ram.

The Cielcin had set up a line of cannons along the right flank of their army. Bristling, spiny things of the same darkly organic design as their armor, ribbed and corded as muscle tissue. As I watched, they fired, thunder slapping the air. One of our Falcons fell, transformed into a tumbling ball of flame. And above that, upon the uttermost crown of the Storm Wall, barely noticeable against the blackness, I saw the winged shapes of our Irchtani beating the air.

Something nearer at hand caught my eye. The glint of light on white metal, on ceramic, on bone. And there it was, huge and hideous and very much alive. The vayadan-general Bahudde emerged from the midst of its army. Even at this distance, it looked the worse for wear: armor dinted, the linkages of one arm exposed, the light of one red eye put out. But the creature’s brain and coiled spine were yet intact, safe in some jar in its chest. I bared my teeth involuntarily.

The beast strode out past the foremost ranks of its men, arms raised. Above it, the clouds parted in fire as another siege tower—this one larger than the rest—smashed down from the heavens. Its engines blazed to slow its descent, filling the air with the noise of fire. Our lighters were nowhere to be seen—had the xenobites’ cannons done for them? And what was in the massive dropship?

“Hadrian!”

I must have lingered longer than I thought, and slid quickly back down the ladder, ducking back into the scorched landing pit.

“See anything?” Valka asked.

“That giant’s still alive.”

“Fuck me!” One of the men swore. “The one from the city?” Bassander cleared his throat, but the fellow didn’t seem to get the message. “The one that looks like a fucking baby?”

“Language, soldier,” the captain said, acid in his words.

Facing the vulgar soldier, I said, “The same. They’ve called down another tower—bigger than the rest.”

“Dorayaica?” Bassander asked.

I shrugged. “Could be, but it looked more like a cargo rocket. Like they’ve brought the heavy artillery.”

“Fuck me with a lance!” the soldier swore, turning away.

“Order!” Bassander clipped the fellow with the butt of his lance, hard but not hard enough to do any real harm. “Pull yourselves together. We have work to do.”

There was no float pallet to be found, and in the end, it took a half dozen men apiece to lift and carry the big fuel cells. It was slow going, for the cells were heavy and the halls just wide enough to accommodate the men and their load.

“It’s not far,” Bassander said for what felt like the dozenth time. Somewhere ahead was a tram platform and tunnel that ran directly beneath the enemy army. “With any luck, there’ll be a tram in the platform.”

As he spoke, I had visions of loading the fuel cells aboard a train and sending that unmanned down the tunnel. Lorian Aristedes, you’ve done it again.

The Cielcin it seemed had not penetrated so far back into the complex from the holes torn in the tarmac, or else they’d not found their way into the maintenance passages as yet. If Lorian’s maps were correct, we would remain in access corridors until we hit the concourse, and then it was another five hundred feet or so to the tramway platform. That would be the point of maximum danger.

Tap.

Was it my imagination? Or had I heard something coming behind?

Near the rear of the line, I turned, looking back into emergency-lit gloom. Nothing but red darkness greeted me. Cautious, I slid my sword from its holster, fingers ready on the trigger.

“What is it?” Valka asked.

I shook my head, nodded for her to move on ahead of me.

We kept moving, progress slowed by the weight of the canisters. Sounds from the fighting still played over the comm, and Pallino’s voice overrode the din. “You all best hurry up, Had. We won’t hold long here.”

“Get them air support, damn it!” I growled at Lorian, ears pricking for the sound again.

Tap-tap.

Memories of the way Iubalu had hounded us in the bowels of its ship came back to me, and I moved a little faster, butting up against the rear of our column. It took a measure of self-control to slow my pace, to allow space to form again between us. I was certainly not imagining things. Something had found us in the dark. I tried to call on my new vision, but could see only the hall about me and our small caravan playing out around me, refracted across countless variations of the same slow passage.

Tap. Tap-tap.

A low grinding like the noise of chainsaws sputtering to life roared up not twenty paces behind. The number of possible presents—possible hallways—fractured in my new awareness, little infinities spawning larger ones. I saw them in my vision before I saw them with my eyes, before I turned my head. The nahute had been slithering along the ceiling, invisible along the piping and the ductwork there. Five of them leaped at once, and at once I turned, vision bright and clear. Highmatter kindled in my fist, and taking hold of the vision I stepped from one instance of our hallway to the next, to a place in possible time where my blade sliced clean through all five of the metal drones. Some unconscious part of me, I think, had recognized the danger before my waking mind and imported that danger to my vision, clarifying it. The torn devices tumbled in pieces around me, and I stood a moment open-mouthed, shocked that it had worked.

So shocked that the vision broke and I was left standing there amazed when the snakes’ owner leaped from the darkness. The scahari moved like an ape, bounding forward on hands and feet. I had a momentary impression of black claws and glassy teeth before it struck me full in the chest with its horned crest. I hurtled backward with it on top of me, claws sinking into my suit’s environment layer. I felt bruises flower and blood well between the fibers even as the gel layer hardened to protect my flesh.

But for once in all my life, I’d managed to keep my sword. Any ordinary blade would have been useless slapping an armored opponent in the back, but Sir Olorin’s sword was anything but ordinary. Despite the creature’s weight on my chest and arm, I could still bend my wrist, still push the blade effortlessly down into the flesh of the creature atop me. Black blood flowed, and the beast sagged against me.

I threw it off and—rolling over—made to scrabble to my feet.

Clawed hands seized me, slashing my white cape. Only on my knees, I fell, sword punching a hole in the concrete floor. A shot rang out, and dead weight collapsed on me once more. Rough hands seized mine and hauled me to my feet, pulling me clear of the enemy.

“Run!” I cried out, waving my hand.

The men carrying the payloads began to trot, moving in time with a chant begun by one of the triasters to keep them from jostling the dangerous accelerant. Bassander took the lead, his own sword—the sword he’d taken from Admiral Whent on Pharos—lighting the way like a beacon.

It wasn’t fast enough.

Tearing my mangled cape from my shoulders, I turned and faced the other Pale who had come. Four of them stood there masked and armored. Their leader had only one eye in its mask. The other side bore the image of the Hand.

“Go on!” I called to the guards behind me. “Protect the others.”

“But!” Valka said, and I sensed her take a step nearer.

“They’ll need you if any of those metal monsters catch up!” I said, and waved her back.

I do not dare write down Valka’s curse.

“Noyn jitat,” I said under my breath, knowing I would not hear the end of it if we escaped Berenike alive.

Having seemingly learned their lesson from the two Pale dead at my feet, the others kept their distance, shrinking from the advance of my moonlight blade. They clustered behind their leader, who I felt certain must be shielded. Step by careful half-step, I pressed forward. They drew back. They had no nahute, no firearms, would not risk their own lives on explosives in so confined a space.

“Tuka . . . devil ne?” their leader asked, struggling with the terminal consonant on the human word devil.

“I am,” I said, standing straighter.

The commander drew back, breath hissing past glass teeth. “Numeu ti-Shiomu, yukajji!” it said. You belong to the Prophet, vermin.

“If your master wants me,” I said, trying not to be fazed by this grim pronouncement, “marerra o-tajun civaqari eza velenamuri ti-koun!”

Tell it to come and take me!

That said, I took three great halting steps forward, blade raised and pointed at the enemy, ready to strike. Then the most incredible thing happened: the Cielcin turned and ran. Perhaps they realized they were outmatched. Perhaps there was no way they might take me alive. Perhaps they meant to lead me into a trap and hoped I’d charge after them. Acting fast, I drew my plasma burner and fired left-handed. The violet arc lanced out. Too late.

They were gone.

---

I found the others on the tram platform. Bassander only nodded when I emerged from the darkness and the rearguard put up their guns at the sight of me. Valka sniffed and turned her head.

“Are you hurt?” she asked stonily, still caring.

“They ran,” I said. “Didn’t like their chances against a shielded man with this.” I waved the unkindled sword.

The Tavrosi woman made a clicking sound with her tongue.

“There’s no tram,” said the vulgar soldier from earlier.

Bassander jumped down from the platform to the rails below. “Then we carry them.”

The soldier was not alone in swearing.

“Pass the payload off where you can. Fresh arms. Double time!” And to Lin’s credit he stowed his own blade and helped a brawny decurion muscle the first of the canisters onto the tracks. “Marlowe, guard the tunnel mouth.” There was a flash of the old Lin. The heat of the moment had driven his holy terror of me from his mind a moment, and he added, “We’d know if they’d breached the tunnel at the other end, right?”

“It would be on our sensors,” Lorian confirmed when I relayed the question. “Hurry, Pallino’s men are getting it hard.”

“If this doesn’t distract them,” I told the good commander, “I don’t know what will.”

In a matter of moments, Bassander’s men traded the canisters down to their fresher comrades on the tracks below—save where a few of the hardier volunteers kept going. The Mandari captain and his men vanished into the darkness, and we had only the slow rattle of their armor to keep us company on the platform. There were little more than a dozen of us, and we were alone in the eye of the storm.

“This is all too easy,” Valka said.

“You call this easy?” I asked, unable to keep the pain from my voice. I knew what she meant, but my encounter with the Cielcin in the hall was still with me, and my blood was cold as the sounds of Pallino’s men fighting rang constant in my ear.

“Bastards got behind us!”

“Fall back! Fall back!”

I kept waiting to hear the two messages I feared to hear most of all: that Pallino was dead, or that the Cielcin had gotten into the tram tunnels between the starport and the Storm Wall. I felt that one or both was inevitable, and that one or both must come soon. I kept reviewing the starport map in the corner of my vision. If we went by the main concourse, we could rejoin Pallino in minutes.

“The fuckers are breaking off!” came one voice. “They’re pulling back.”

“Hit ’em hard!”

I glanced at Valka, brows contracting beneath the mask. “Pallino.” I pressed fingers to reseat the bone conduction patch behind my ear. “What’s going on?”

“Not sure, Had! They’re pulling back deeper into the terminals.”

“Into the terminals?” I asked. “Toward us?”

“Might be! Might be they just got enough down here now they’re spreading out. It’s thick as hell here!”

Fingers still on the patch beneath the undersuit, I said, “We’re almost there. Just need a little more time.”

“Damn it!” the chiliarch replied. “Damn it. Had, I think they found the tunnels.”

My blood—already cold—froze over. Bassander had left a small rearguard detachment with the refugees when he mined the tramway tunnels, and a few hoplites with hard shields and a plasma howitzer or two could hold a narrow way against a horde, but not forever. I had visions of the Cielcin and their nahute chewing their way down those tunnels like lightning down a wire and clenched my jaw. I thought of the soldier, Renna. She was going to die.

“We have to get them out of there,” I said. And there was still the matter of Bahudde’s siege tower to consider. What had the vayadan-general called down from its master’s dark fortress?

Valka massaged her neck. “We can’t do anything for them. The Storm Wall is full. There’s nowhere to go. We have to hope this,” she nodded at the tramway and Bassander’s makeshift bomb, “will distract them.”

“We need to hit them hard,” I said.

“How?” she demanded.

I cast about for an answer, circling where I stood, but there was nothing. Growling, I looked back along the tramway. “Lin, tell me you’re almost done.”

“Nearly there!” came the Mandari captain’s groaning reply. It sounded as though he was carrying one of the fuel cells himself. “This had better work.”

Silently, I agreed with him, and seized Valka’s hand. She did not pull away, not even when the sounds of hurrying feet slapped the concourse in the dark ahead, back the way we had come. I took a half-step forward, ordering the small knot of exhausted men around us to form a cordon, hoplites in front.

“Done!” Bassander’s voice crackled in my ears. “On our way back.”

A full squad of Cielcin appeared, running hunched and bow-legged, clearly hunting.

“Yukajjimn!” one said, jostling its brother. Whatever had made the Pale in the tunnel retreat had no effect on these. The Cielcin fanned out, circling our little knot. Bassander would be back in moments. How long should it take for his men to run back? Five minutes? Six? Less, if all they needed was to be within firing distance.

I let go of Valka’s hand, raised my sword.

“Run, little worms!” one of the xenobites said. “Run and hide!” Its brethren all laughed.

“Veih ioman!” I called back. “No more!”

I felt strangely naked without my cape, but drew myself up to my full height all the same, the better to stand as near to eye-to-eye with the enemy as was possible. The Pale leaped from either side, fast as cavalry. There must have been thirty of them, more than twice the number of men who’d remained on the platform. I heard a cry as one of ours went down, crushed beneath the bulk of two inhuman berserkers. Pressing forward, I sliced clear through one of the attackers, sinking into a low guard, blade thrust straight out.

“Stick close!” I said to Valka, throwing an arm between her and the Pale. Plasma arcs burned around me, violet cutting the air and boiling it even through the insulating layers of my suit. The Cielcin retreated, losing four or five of their number in the brief conflagration. Behind me, I heard the tinny sound of a spent heat sink clattering to the floor.

“Your time is almost up! Not long! Not long now!” one of the xenobites said, teeth gnashing beneath the lip of its mask. “Velnuri mnu.”

But the lull in combat lasted only so long as it took the Cielcin to half-encircle us again. Again they leaped, pincering from either side. Again I rushed forward, hewing at their weakened center, trying not to think about the noise one of our men had made as the creatures felled him. There must have been just over twenty of them remaining. There were perhaps ten of us. Flames smoldered on padded benches, and the cherry-red glow of plasma scoring arced on the walls.

Not long indeed.

Valka went down beside me. Something had caught her ankle, and whirling I found one of the berserkers crawling across the floor, dragging a leg that left a black smear on the tile floor. Even as I turned, Valka kicked it mightily in the face, knocking its mask off. I had a brief impression of round, hollow eyes beneath the smooth ridge of brow. Before I could get to her, Valka got the muzzle of her antique repeater between her and that face. Fired.

Then it was left to me to haul her out from beneath the monster.

Fire rained about us, and I turned my head in time to see a squad of men returning up the hall, Bassander Lin at their head, firing his lance, bayonet flashing dully in the red gloom. They made the platform in seconds.

“We need to move quickly!” Bassander said, already brushing past. The Cielcin lay dead and dying about us, bodies mingled with the bodies of our own fallen men. The captain stepped blithely over human and inhuman alike, lingering only to wave to the survivors—leading from the front. “This way!”

We had to put distance between ourselves and the blast, had to close distance with Pallino’s survivors, because the minute our makeshift bomb went off, there was no telling what the xenobites would do.

Then came the call I feared most that bloody day.

“They’re in the tunnels!” said one.

“Must have cleared the rubble!” said another.

I swore an oath to make even Valka blush. “Bassander!”

“Not yet!”

I was glad at least I could not hear the screams. How many had Lorian packed back into the Storm Wall? How many were left squeezed into that tunnel, close as fugue-sleepers? Ten thousand? Twenty? There had been hundreds of thousands in the starport when the attack began, and the tunnels beneath the Storm Wall were already well past capacity, and Lorian’s efforts to save everyone could as well damn them to a slow death safe in the bunkers. Too little air, too little water, too much heat. They might hold ’til the fleet came, but if they failed? Starvation, pestilence, and thirst would claim us all.

“Now!” The captain produced a detonator wand. He drew to a stop, the better to ensure he made no mistakes. He flicked the cap up, and his thumb down.

Thunder. White heat burned even so far down the hall. I felt the wave rush over us, saw the distant glow of fire. And then?

There was another explosion, deeper, darker than the first. Lorian hooted in my ear, and I guessed the plan had worked. On the surface above, the earth split, heaving two of the siege towers skyward as the vaults below erupted. One rocket crashed quiescent to the earth below, the other buckled and burst as it fell, erupting in a nimbus of fire that consumed the other downed vessel and the hundreds of scahari about them.

As above, so below.

As Hauptmann’s fleet had been the victim of a runaway matter-antimatter cascade, so the destruction of those two siege towers fanned out, breaching fuel containment in three more of the ships around. In moments, a full third of the Cielcin landing craft were reduced to burning slag, and thousands of the creatures nearest were swallowed in the firestorm.

Underground, I knew nothing of this.

Underground, I knew only the strange hollering of the Pale as they got the message. Something in the air twanged, and the tenor shifted as the enemy reeled, confused. We’d struck them a mighty blow. Thus we returned to the chamber where the colossus had broken through. Its leg had shifted, splayed out so that it made a shallow incline from floor to earth above. There the survivors of Pallino’s unit clustered in the midst of that hall, pressed into knots about the foot of the fallen colossus.

Bassander and I fell into step beside one another, each of us cutting a swath through the enemy. Swords that once had clashed with one another rang then side by side, and the enemy fell back, parting before the onslaught of those unstoppable blades.

“Took you long enough!” Pallino shouted, sounding the whistle that made his men shift ranks, rotating fresh men to the front.

“We ran into some trouble!” I shot back. “Is this all there is?” I gestured at the knot of men about him, mingled hoplites and peltasts standing—each bracing the man in front of him—in a box formation against the wall and the ruined machine.

The chiliarch shook his head. “I sent Oro and three hundred men after them into the tunnels, and there are some that got cut off nearer Terminal G, where the first breach is.” He pointed. I pulled Valka through the defensive lines, ducking a blow from one Cielcin screamer as we went. The creature fell a moment after, struck down by the hoplites at the front of the line. “We can’t stay here!”

“We can’t abandon the refugees!” I shouted back, clambering onto the lip of the machine beside.

Pallino seized me by the shoulders. “We’re no good to them dead. We need to move.” He pointed up the leg of the colossus and out onto the surface.

“Over the top?” I asked, echoing the words Valka had said were madness.

“Over the top.”