WHAT IS THAT CLASSICAL English expression? Out of the frying pan, into the fire.

We were surrounded, but we had struck a mighty blow against the enemy, and we had less than an hour before our fleet arrived. We could make it, but only if we could win free to some better position. My stunt in the control room had bought us time and taken out an entire enemy platoon, but I’d thrown us from one desperate position to another.

All the air in the command center had rushed out when I’d cut the floor out from under us, and the lances of the men about me fired mutely at the approaching foe. Bright spots flashed against their rubberized armor and smoked as they fell.

“There’s no way they can power on the refinery again, after that,” Crim said, looking up at the ruins of the control room. “We should radio the Ascalon for evac. It can get here before the fleet.”

“They know we’re here now,” I said. “They’ll be on guard . . . shoot it right out of the sky. We need the fleet for cover!” As I spoke, I slashed one of the enemy’s nahute in half, ending its murderous flight. A lone Cielcin berserker leaped down from a catwalk over our heads, the point of its sword thrust down to skewer me. I jumped aside. The xenobite’s ceramic blade bit the floor and splintered. It rounded on me, abandoning its broken sword. The creature was strangely puppet-like with its face hidden, like one of the full-scale marionettes one sometimes saw perform at the courts of Nipponese lords.

Pallino’s voice dominated the line. “We can’t stay here!”

“The tram!” someone shouted.

The tram. There were a set of maintenance tram cars that ran along the exterior of the collider beltway, making it so that workers could ride all around the massive machine if necessary to affect repairs. There were waystations placed at regular intervals about the track for those repair missions that took station techs thousands of miles from the compound on Virdi Planum. They relied on magnetic accelerators, and in the airless environs of Eikana, could reach speeds of nearly three hundred miles per hour.

“Will it work?” I asked.

A thin voice rose in answer. “Should do! The trams should be on a separate system.”

“They’re not far!” said another.

“We still have to get there,” said a third.

“Then move!” I ordered, brandishing my sword in the direction of the platform.

Another trio of Cielcin screamers clambered down from atop the housing of one of the magnetic coils. Pallino shot one and ran the second through with the bayonet of his lance. The other’s sword clanged against his armor, and another soldier shot the creature before it could try again.

The nearest tram platform was not far: straight ahead and down a short stair beneath the track of the hadron colliders where it ran clear through the refinery. Crim was already at the steps, locked in combat with one of the Pale. Another of the nahute flew past my head, braided metal body rolling against my shield like a passing eel. I heard a man scream, and to my left I saw him fall, writhing as one of the alien drones chewed through his suit’s underlayment and burrowed in the flesh beneath.

Something huge and white landed on the nearest catwalk, and thin strand of metal buckled beneath its weight and crashed to the floor in eerie quiet. Huge as a bear, the chimera loomed over my men, dull white armor and thin limbs making it seem like the skeleton of a giant. The half-machine creature seized one of my men with fingers long as daggers and snapped him like a rag doll. Without breaking stride, the giant hurled the body of its victim at another of our men, who hit the deck and skidded beneath the weight of his dead comrade.

“Keep moving!” Pallino shouted, taking aim at the giant.

Cielcin crashed into our company from either side. They had the numbers and the superior position, but we were shielded, and the light of our energy-lances tore through their line like a hot knife through wax. The giant lashed out with its arm, sweeping two of my men off their feet. They hit the wall and bounced off, tumbling down the stairs after Crim.

I drew up, sword in hand.

I was on the wrong side.

The chimera’s turret of a head swiveled toward me.

“Found you!” The flat, mechanical voice sounded over my suit’s built-in comms, and I knew it was no ordinary chimera that stood before me. Twice the height of a man it stood and narrower, as though it were an evening shadow cast back across the earth. Its white armor was of adamant, proof against even my sword. All the villainous art of MINOS lay in the shape of its graceful arms, the wicked curves of its knife-like fingers, and in the faceless terror it called a head crowned with metal spines. Here was no mere lieutenant, no servile creature. Here was the general itself, the vayadan Hushansa.

“You’re smaller than the others!” I said, taunting it in its own tongue. It wasn’t even Many-Handed . . . “Was there nothing left when they built you?” I watched over the general’s shoulder to where the front half of our forces hurried around the bend for the tramway.

Hushansa’s fingers all lengthened. A hatch opened in its shoulder, exposing the silvered head of some projectile. The grapnel lanced out, fast as an arrow—slow enough to pierce a shield. Time stretched, and at once there were countless millions of grapnels arcing toward me. So accurate was the general’s machine-assisted aim that most struck the soft joints of my armor and skewered me like a fish on a line. Many more bounced off, and others . . . I raised my sword and slashed the grapnel in half, severing the line before the awful spike could strike home.

“Gennuthar ne!” Hushansa said. Impossible.

I said nothing.

“Hadrian, we need to move,” Pallino said from his place at my shoulder.

“I know.”

A flash of violet light smote the metal giant, and Hushansa lurched to one knee. I knew that tell-tale shade, the color of hydrogen plasma.

“Grenade!” the cry went up a moment after, and a second flash of light followed as superheated plasma blossomed against the back of the staggered giant. Hushansa fell face-forward, scrabbling against the floor like some manner of crab. I saw Crim standing at the top of the stairs, Jaddian robe flapping strangely in that airless place. Two legionnaires bracketed him, each aiming the short grenade launchers at the slumped metal monster. The plasma grenades were suspended in a colloidal gel that made them stick to whatever they impacted. The launchers themselves were only air-fed, relied on gas cartridges to fire them slow enough to bypass any personal shield. Hushansa rose, rounded on them.

“Talaq!” Crim exclaimed. That was fire in his native Jaddian.

The grenadiers fired again, and again twin rosettes of violet fire bloomed. The metal monster lurched backward, fired a barrage of pin missiles from a hatch in one wrist. They impacted against Crim’s shield and those of his men, useless.

“Forward!” I shouted to the knot of men who stood with me, pointing toward the stairs with my sword.

The next barrage of grenades struck home. Pale shards of the general’s white armor flew in all directions. The crowned head fell and hit the metal floor with what would have been a mighty clangor had there been air to hear it.

I had no time to reflect upon the death of so great a captain of our enemy. I followed Pallino down the steps, spurring our men before me. Crim stopped to help one of the injured to his feet and carried him with one arm wrapped about his shoulders. We hadn’t far to go: down the steps and around a bend to the left, then down a hall that ran along just beneath the main body of the colliders’ housing to the tram platform.

Cielcin stood in our way, but we cut them down as we came jogging and limping down the stairs. Twice I slashed nahute from the air, and when one of the Cielcin dropped from the collider track above, I took its legs out from under it with a single sweep of my blade.

The tram lay dead ahead now: two short cars hanging from the overhead magnetic rail bracketed to the underside of the colliders. Without concern for aerodynamics, they were ugly, square things wrought of the same gunmetal as the refinery itself. My eye followed their track in a straight line past where it exited through an open arch in the refinery’s outer wall and vanished to a point on the horizon.

“Almost there,” Crim said to the man he carried.

“Get the men on board!” I said, gesturing sharply to Pallino. We had perhaps forty minutes until the fleet arrived. If we could get as far as the nearest waystation along the track of the hadron collider, we would make it. The foremost of our men already had the doors open and were piling inside. Crim made the threshold and pushed the injured man into the arms of two of the others and doubled back to hold the door.

The voice of the tech who’d powered down the particle accelerator chimed in. “We’re ready to go here.”

“Take the first car and go!” I said to Crim, who nodded and ducked through the hatchway. Reaching the level of the second, I turned back. A full dozen of our men still came, stretched out across half a hundred yards of hall. Behind them rushed a small army of the Pale. The nearest Cielcin whirled nahute above their heads like bolos, their brethren loping behind, long arms trailing almost to the ground.

Then came a scream, a cry like grinding metal, so loud I felt it in my chest and through the soles of my boots. I froze where I stood, knowing the sound heralded some new evil. The Cielcin hurled their metal serpents, and the men at my side fired. One of the nahute caught fire and bricked itself, crashing to the plated floor. Another caught the hindmost of our running men and dropped him. I felt my muscles spasm as I made to leap forward, but Pallino caught me. “It’s too late, Had!” he said, fingers tight on my arm.

Behind me, a loud bang heralded the disengagement of the braking mechanism on the first car. The whole hall shook, and a faint hum and vibration shook the ductwork all around as electromagnets powered on. I had a brief glimpse of Crim as I looked back over my shoulder and watched the hatch of the first tram car slide shut. The old assassin did not salute, only gave a perfunctory little wave with the first two fingers of his left hand—the rest still clutched one of his beloved knives. Then he was gone, and fully half our men slid away on silent accelerators, launched near-instantaneously to three hundred miles per hour. They cleared the wall of the refinery in seconds, and soon they were little more than a black dot shrinking as it rocketed toward the horizon . . . and safety.

The metallic shrieking resounded through the superstructure all around, and even the onrushing Pale drew up short.

“Hurry! Damn your eyes!” Pallino spat, waving the other men on.

In the distance I discerned a pale shadow moving amidst the coming horde. Like the Cielcin it was, but greater—taller and narrower, its featureless turret of a head capped with a crown of silver spines.

It was my turn to say, “Impossible.”

The vayadan-general Hushansa parted the ranks of its men like a rock in the course of a black river, its clawed hands outspread. “You are not the only one who can’t be killed!” it said. The same flat voice. The same cold laughter.

“Another one?” Pallino asked.

I shook my head. “The same one.”

I felt the chiliarch grow tense. “Crim’s boys blew that fucker away, man.”

“Evidently not.”

The Cielcin general must have given some signal to its men, for the other Cielcin drew back, allowing their master to pass them and come nearer me. It had to stoop beneath a stanchion that buttressed the colliders as it came, lest the points of its crown scrape the metal.

“Marerose o-okun,” it said, straightening. “I told you: you cannot escape.”

“Hadrian . . .” Pallino tugged my arm. The general’s intervention had allowed our men the chance they needed to clear the last few dozen yards to the tram. We were nearly free. “Hadrian!”

Something in the force behind that second Hadrian made me turn my head. Another of the crowned chimeras stood at the far end of the hall moving slowly toward us, identical to the first—and to the one Crim had slain upon the stair.

Two Hushansas.

“Hushansa the Many-Handed,” I said, looking from one copy to the other, understanding growing in me like a cancer. The creature Crim’s grenadiers had dispatched above was not Hushansa, nor were either of the creatures before us in the hall. Neither—I guessed—was the thing that had attacked us on the stairs and died in the airlock when we blew the door of the command center. The true Hushansa lay elsewhere, safe on some grounded shuttle or even in the fleet above the refinery. These bodies—these hands—were its shadows, its puppets, emanations of its vile will. There was nothing of the original flesh in them, as had been true of its brothers. They were no two alike, these vayadayan of the White Hand. The human magi who served the Cielcin had fashioned each according to its need. Iubalu had been a crawling horror, Bahudde a giant thirty feet high. This Hushansa was a ghost flitting between bodies, possessing one or several at will. Turning my head so I could see either creature by turn, I said, “I see.”

“You cannot hope to win,” it said, spreading its hands. “What did you hope to accomplish coming here? We will take the fuel stores and destroy this place from orbit. What have you achieved?”

Beneath my mask, I smiled. “Sim yadanolo ne?” I asked it. Can’t you guess?

The right thigh of the first of Hushansa’s bodies opened up, and the general reached in and drew out a sword. The blade hinged open, unfolding to its full length. It looked short at the end of the creature’s too-long arm, but it was easily seven feet from pommel to point. Every fiber in me screamed to make a move for the tram car, but I knew the instant I turned my back it would be on me, and if I knew one thing about the metal demons those traitorous scientists had crafted in the bowels of Arae, it was that they were fast.

Instead, I willed my mind to calm, to find that clear space beneath feeling—that Quiet space within. The first Hushansa lunged at me with its sword. I twisted sideways, shoving Pallino out of the way. As I’d expected, the second Hushansa had leaped as well, hands outstretched to seize me. Each moved faster than any mortal man could react, but slow enough to skate beneath the energy threshold of my shield. The blade should have pierced my chest, at least impacted my armor. Those taloned hands should have seized on me thigh and shoulder.

But for every potential state where they succeeded, there were as many quantum positions where they failed. The blade that should have pierced me passed through me instead, and the taloned hands that should have seized on me closed on empty air. Understand: I was not insubstantial. I only interposed one reality on the other. Hushansa’s blade and my chest occupied the same place in the universe, but with the power the Quiet had given me, I willed the two not to meet. For a moment, the universe recognized a paradox.

I ended it by stepping aside—stepping out of the blade and talons. My sword flashed, shearing up through the ceramic of the giant’s blade and down deep into the joint at the back of one knee. The chimera’s armor may have been proof against even highmatter, but the common metal of its joint was not. The metal leg buckled and one giant stumbled, crashed into the other.

“Go!” I shouted to Pallino, and almost shoved him onto the tram car. I staggered against the doorframe, head swimming with the cost of what I’d just done. I felt sick, felt that I must vomit there in my helmet.

It will pass, I told myself, and clambered after Pallino.

Behind us, the two Hushansas struggled to untangle themselves. The Cielcin soldiers behind them hurled nahute at us. I spun on the threshold and hit the red button that slammed the tramway door on silent hydraulics.

“Launch, damn you!” I hissed into the comm. Already my ill spell was passing, head and vision clearing, leaving only the dull tattoo of blood in my ears.

The soldier at the tram controls did as he was ordered, and I felt the faint hum as the car’s electromagnets powered on. We started moving, smooth as a ship on a mirrored pool. Through the alumglass window, I saw the uninjured Hushansa find its feet. That crowned-turret head swiveled, found us with unseen optics. We were surely moving half a hundred miles an hour already.

The chimera ran.

Using its long arms like legs, the unholy thing bounded after us, tearing along the edge of the tram platform at speeds no living creature could match. We accelerated. Still it gained.

“Black Earth . . .” I heard someone swear.

The beast was running out of platform. The arched opening in the refinery wall was dead ahead, we would pass it in seconds. Beyond, the laser-straight track of the collider ran out above the desert and airless wastes of Virdi Planum and vanished over the horizon.

“Get back!” I shouted, shouldering my way to the rear of the car.

Hushansa leaped. Its great mass and velocity carried it through the air like a missile, and the whole tram car rattled like a bell. I fell sideways against the wall of the compartment, and had a brief glimpse of the thing’s white torso through a rear window. Hushansa had caught onto the rear of the tram car, clung to it like an insect.

A muffled bang reverberated through the tram car, and the whole thing shook. Beyond the windows, black desert swept by. We had cleared the refinery, and the tram car was rocketing toward its top speed, putting distance between us and the Cielcin horde in the refinery.

“Where is it?” I ground my teeth, trying to figure out where our enemy had gone. I craned my neck, peering wildly out the windows.

Another bang echoed up from my feet. An image of the chimera clinging to the bottom of the tram pod flashed in my mind, and for a moment I considered thrusting my sword through the floor. Lights bracketed to the underbelly of the collider above flashed by, marking out the miles as we streaked farther and faster from the refinery.

I couldn’t afford to miss.

The whole tram began to rattle then, and an awful squealing whine conducted through the superstructure all around us.

“We lost power!” the man at the controls shouted. The magnets that ran along the overhead rail had been switched off. We were grinding to a halt then, bleeding speed as we squeaked along the last stretch of rail. The waystation was not yet in sight, and behind, the refinery had been reduced to a pale blur of light on the far horizon. The pilot slapped the controls, cursing.

Yet another bang resounded through the car . . . and we were falling, hurled from the rail above like a stone skipped across the surface of the lake. The low gravity worked in our favor, and someone somewhere in the car screamed at us to brace for impact. The car struck stone and sand and bounced, tossing us head over heels. I caught a rail and held it, glad my suit’s gel-layer hardened to protect my joints. Still, I hit the ceiling, my body and the others all hurled like fish in a barrel. The tram car tumbled wildly, throwing up sand and dust as it tumbled across the desert.

We ground to a halt across hundreds of yards, rolled far out from the silver track of the hadron collider.

“Open the doors!” I barked. “We have to get out before it gets here!”

If the chimera made it inside the crashed pod, it would carve us all to ribbons in seconds.

Fully a third of the men sprawled on the tram seats or on the gray floor; dead or dazed I was not sure. Each’s man armor ought to have saved him as I’d been saved, but there was no telling—and there was no time. We’d settled on an angle such that we had to climb toward the exit. Two of the men had the hatchway open, and one had leaped out onto the sands, his lance primed.

Where was Hushansa?

“Radio the others,” I snapped at one of the men. “Tell them what happened.” I lingered a moment on the lip of the tram car, gaze sweeping the sands. The track of the hadron collider shimmered above us like an oversized aqueduct, its line of graceful arches marching toward eternity in each direction, the only monument to civilization in sight.

How far had we traveled in so short a time, and how quickly?

My head still rang from the fall. I’d lost track of how much time remained before the fleet arrived . . .

 . . . and where was Hushansa?

I leaped down onto the sands—glad of Eikana’s gentler gravity. It had made what might have been a disastrous crash that much safer.

“Do you see it?” one of the men asked another, scanning the horizon with lance at the ready.

The other legionnaire’s reply was almost casual. “Maybe it fell somewhere nearer the track?”

The other men were slowly pulling themselves out of the crashed car, the hale helping the injured. Several appeared to have broken limbs in the crash, pure chance or some failure of their suits, I guessed. Our fall had carved a mighty wound in the face of Virdi Planum, a black scar dozens of yards long. It felt wrong for there to be no wind. No fires. No smoke or stink or burning.

“My lord!” One of the men raised his voice and pointed back toward the collider.

A white shape stood tall beneath the arches, and even at this distance I could make out Hushansa’s crown. Across those many hundred yards my eyes met its optic sensors, and I knew it had seen me, too.

Beneath the mask, I grinned again.

“Everyone, get back!” I raised my left hand to underscore the order. Fast as it was, Hushansa might kill any number of them on its way to me if they got in its way. “It’s after me.” It would not kill me, if it could. Its dark master wanted me alive. But it would come for me first of all the men in the company.

Straight for me.

The metal monster moved, bounding toward us across the level ground, loping on all fours like an ape in the lost jungles of Earth. I settled into a low guard, the hilt of my sword unkindled in my right hand.

Quiet as it was and still, my vision came easily, blood hammering still harder in my ears.

Hushansa splintered as my reflection had, became not a creature, but a quantum wave barreling toward me like the changing of the tide. I watched it come, watched lines of potential converge like a holofilm of glass shattering in reverse. The vayadan-general’s body was armored in adamant, proof against even the edge of my Jaddian blade. Impenetrable, save for those rare, soft places where the titanium endoskeleton lay exposed. I might strike at my enemy a billion times, and a billion times I’d fail.

My options narrowed as my enemy boiled closer, crossing a dozen yards for every bound. My focus wavered, a white pain flaring behind my eyes. Whole pieces of the spectrum vanished from my sight, blotted out as I struggled to stretch my still-too-human senses to encompass infinity. Let this be quick, I thought, and waited, fingers on the twin triggers that would kindle my blade, hand back, toe forward. There would be a way—one way in a billion—for my blade to strike true.

The demon captain was upon me then and leaped, claws outstretched to seize me.

Fingers tightened on the triggers, and liquid metal blossomed and shone brighter than the watchful stars. I lunged, all my possibilities collapsing in that clarion instant to a single, perfect reality.

The blade connected with Hushansa’s leg on the outside of the knee, bit, and cut. Sliding upward, it found the ball-and-socket joint of the chimera’s hip, and, rising, sheared through the left leg from groin to hip—and caught the left arm inside the elbow. The giant fell to pieces and tumbled to the dust about me. My blade completed its arc, and I stood unmoved. Triumphant.

All about me, the men cheered.

“Halfmortal!” they called, and “Marlowe! Marlowe!”

I turned slowly, found the remains of Hushansa’s torso trying to right itself with its one remaining hand. There was no point trying to threaten it—it had no life in that body to lose. No part of the creature’s brain or organic body was there. Only an echo, a copy of its ghost. Desperate, a panel opened in its shoulder and the harpoon lanced out, but its balance betrayed it in its crippled state and the shot went wide.

“It doesn’t matter!” the vayadan said, voice sounding in my suit speakers. “We will have you in time. The Shiomu will have you in time.”

The Prophet.

I stopped five paces from the ruined hulk. Hushansa leaned upon its one remaining arm. It angled its faceless head defiantly. “And you have failed here. Kianna!” It made that flat, shrill sound that passed for laughter among its kind. “Run back to your Emperor and tell him you failed. This world is ours.”

“Is it?” I asked. I took one more step forward to show I was unafraid. “Run back to your master. Tell it I’m coming.”

Hushansa laughed again. “Tsuareu suh cadolo ni ne?”

You still think you can win!

I took a few steps back, made a gesture with my left hand.

My men got the message. Two grenadiers fired on the ruined general. The puppet body blew apart in a rosette of violet flame that cast my shadow far across the level sands.

The rest was silence.

We had nothing to do but wait. Not long after, a new sun flashed in the middle of the sky and faded. Another. A third that banished the stars. Each faded in turn. Our fleet had come, right on schedule. Before long, shuttles and lightercraft streaked across the sky and fired on the refinery. While we waited in the desert, we watched the lightning of their war play out as the brief Battle of Eikana unfolded. With the collider neutralized, our forces were able to safely take the refinery.

At last, the arrowhead shape of the Ascalon appeared on the horizon just as the true sun was rising over Virdi Planum, and only when it landed and Crim emerged with the medical staff from two adjoining shuttles did young Leon approach.

“How did you do . . .” he gestured at the ruins of Hushansa’s third or fourth body, at the collider standing in the middle distance, at the spot where the distant refinery still lurked, “. . . all that?”

No my lord, no sir.

“I told you,” I said. “Some stories are true.”