It’s not the first pirate refuge we’ve found, but it is the oldest. Its halls are pitch black. My helm provides the only light. Rifle up, I turn a corner and a shape lunges at me. I slam down to a knee and fire three times like Fel taught me. I report contact and search the hallway for more. None appear, and with my heart in my throat I inspect my kill.
It’s just bones. A skeleton, now shattered. I laugh at myself. “Cancel contact,” I say, embarrassed. “Just a skeleton.” No one replies. “Fel?”
Static hisses.
“Fel? Copy? Shit.” I glance behind me. Our coms are military grade.Shouldn’t be enough interference from the walls to block the signal. I hail the ship. Nothing. Knowing I’ll get bitched apart and stuck on latrine duty if I don’t complete my recon, I press on despite the hammering of my heart. I find sleeping quarters filled with floating personal effects, a storage room with medical equipment, and a mess hall with skeletons. I sweep my rifle counter-clockwise through the room. Nothing moves except the skeletons. There must be nearly fifty clothed in tattered jumpsuits. They float in a tangled dance over tables bolted to the floor. I creep toward one and shine my light into his eyeholes.
A hand grips my shoulder from behind. I jump and wheel only to have my rifle muzzle knocked upward. It’s Fel. I breathe easier. “Sonofawhore, you scared the piss out of me.”
He gives me acoms deadsignal then motions to join helmets so we can hear. His voice is muffled. “Coms are down to theSnowball. Probably interference from their reactor. Just bodies back my way.”
“How’d they die?”
Careful, he pulls one of the skeletons closer with his rifle and points to a green tinge on the bones. “Green Death,” he says. “Antique bioweapon. Vacuum resistant. Wiped out dozens of colonies and mines two hundred years back. Just a drop of the virus is grounds for instant quarantine. Yawning is less contagious, literally. Let’s get the Hades out of here.”
No argument from me. He tries hailing theSnowballa few more times before deciding we’ll have to do it on the surface. We make our way back to the hangar and together float upward, out the way we came. I feel better on the solid ground of the surface, and our short-range coms start to work again. Still, we can’t contact theSnowball. “This ’roid’s a sponge for electromagnetism. Must be dense with metals.”He pauses, and I sense the concern in his voice.“Strange. Should have shown up on scans. If a Silver found this place, he’d be a mining king in three years.”
“Except for the Green Death.”
“Good point.”
He reaches the lip of the crater first and stops, staring at something. I hurry and join him. Then I see what he’s looking at.
TheSnowballspins on the horizon, lights flickering.“Pilot, do you read me? Pilot, do we have enemy—”
“Oh…” I murmur as black warships curl around the asteroid. Lightlances from one and theSnowballsimply divides in half. Her two pieces spin in opposite directions and crash soundlessly into the asteroid. The aft rebounds off, disappears into a crater, rebounds again to hit the lip of the crater, and then twirls lazily away toward space. The fore impacts and sticks into the rock a few hundred paces from us. Fel pushes me down.
“Stay,”he says and then springs away. I thought he was moving so fast during our recons just to show off. But it turns out he was moving like a toddler compared to his true top speed. Faster than a Cimmerian hare he races toward the ship’s front section and disappears inside. The warships do not advance.
Instead, they shed black motes. I magnify with my visor and see the motes are shaped like men. Tall ones.
I balance my rifle on the lip of the crater. “Fel, meat contacts are dropping from the ships. I count ten. They’re big, Fel. Fel?”
He emerges from theSnowballcarrying our pilot, Xaria, over his shoulder. The Blue woman is unconscious in her emergency suit. He glances over his shoulder and races back toward me. His voice crackles in my ear. “Pi…corv…iggy…prep…”
The enemy have already landed. I link my rifle’s scope to my helmet and scan the terrain. I barely sight one. A man-shaped shadow skims over the surface of the asteroid and I experience a dread like none I’ve ever felt. I wondered what enemy could make Fel nervous. Now I know. The shadow does not come in a straight line. It jitters, like lightning. I fire six shots and hit nothing, and I’m not a bad shot. Even Fel said so.
Something blurs past me to the right and I tumble back, suit screaming puncture alerts. Arresting myself, I see a long gash along the right side of my suit’s torso. I’m shot, but not wounded. I didn’t even see anyone fire. I deploy a seal before my oxygen vents. As the seal closes, I grab my rifle and rush back to my position just as Fel vaults over the lip, hurls down Xaria, and fires six shots back the way he came with his multiRifle.
“Dustwalkers,” he says. “Get Xaria to the pirate corvette. It’s our only—” Then his left arm comes off as something gleaming passes through just over the biceps. Fel spins, gathering himself just as a shadow blurs past overhead. A tongue of metal sweeps down and cuts Fel’s rifle in half. I fire at the shadow, and must hit it, because its trajectory alters, and it retreats to the west.
I grab Xaria’s foot and boost toward the pirate refuge as Fel covers our retreat. He lands behind us with a clang. His voice is tight, scared.“It’s the same frigate pack we spotted five days ago. We’ll never outrun them.”The door above closes and seals us off from the surface.“You can let that go,”he says.
I look back to Xaria. Her foot is still in my hands, but her body is gone. Her leg was severed at the hip by something with the precision of a medical laser. I let go in horror and the leg drifts away.“Get the corvette’s reactor on. I’ll cover you,”Fel says, his pistol pointed up at the sealed entry. I don’t move.
A shadow crouches atop the corvette. Taking a breath, I drop to a knee, raise my rifle, and pull the trigger. Only…I don’t. Pressure builds in my hand. I look down. My hand still clutches the rifle, but it’s begun to drift away. I move my arm and the hand separates from the wrist. White bone surrounded by bright meat stares back at me. The pain is delayed and indescribable. I’m too horrified to scream. I just pant as my suit seals over the wound.
Gunfire rattles behind me. A hand grips my throat so hard I choke. I’m lifted in the air by a huge Dustwalker in camouflage armor. The Dustwalker is not watching me. They watch Fel. His pistol is broken. His long-knife is out as he faces down another Dustwalker. This one is three heads taller than Fel. The Dustwalker pops their helmet’s blackout visor, revealing a woman’s face. Her bright golden eyes are wide-set and twice as large as mine. Her skin is pale brown, her nose broken innumerable times. She looks at Fel like he’s a joke.
“A long-ranger. I have heard of your cult’s martial worth. Your kind have killed several of our best knights.” She plants her long razor into the floor and pulls a shorter blade to match Fel’s long-knife. “I feared I would not get to test myself before the war was done. Gratitude for this—”
Fel lunges at her faster than I thought possible. The Dustwalker swims to the side. Their blades spark. By the time they part, she’s severed his remaining metal arm at the shoulder. She hacks off his two metal legs, clucking her tongue. He floats, thrashing like a miserable limbless crab. “Be still, Red. You’ll go to your Vale soon enough.” Her eyes scan the hangar. “Bring them. Truth flayers have questions.”
I’m nearly blind with pain as they freight Fel and me out of the pirate refuge to a group of eight more Dustwalkers who wait on the surface.Their ships coast toward us. Casually they fire down on theSnowball’s remains. What was left of the ship that the Alltribe gave to Ephraim for his services simply disappears. The Dustwalkers seem to be speaking to each other. One points off to a bluff in the distance. One of their ships floats lower. A bizarre appendage emerges from his belly. A scanner?
Then a tremble goes through the asteroid. A tremble that makes the Golds look down. The tremble turns into a shudder, and then a shaking. They turn in unison as something rises from the asteroid’s surface several hundred paces off. An obelisk of chrome metal maybe fifty meters high. Another rises to its left, and another, and another. The Moonies stare, as dumbstruck as I am, and see light building in the tips of the obelisks.
The light lunges overhead until the obelisks are linked together by a spiderweb of white light that grows bright and brighter before lashing out toward the ships. My vision goes white. Soon the pain of my severed hand is forgotten as my head explodes in a song of agony. I curl like a spider, screaming. I lose all sense of time, of myself, of my memories. There is only pain. And then it is gone. I don’t feel my body. How long was it?
