The archduke left, running to the turbolift and disappearing inside. I ordered Tredesceu and Pavlov to collect all the weapons and ammunition they could from the dead guards.
“Do you honestly think it will matter, sir?” Tredesceu asked.
I looked at Pavlov, the only one of us not upset to die. “Maybe not, but if they’re going to sing songs about today, then I want those songs to be worth singing.”
Pavlov laughed, then swept my whole arm into his hand. “You will make a fine demon in another life.”
We assembled what we could, bracing security doors open with corpses, preparing straps to attach the Emperor to Pavlov so he could carry her, but we finished every preparation we could imagine well before Darius signaled his attack. Soon enough, I found myself pacing. Had something happened to Darius? Surely it had been too long. I checked my watch.
Tredesceu smiled at me. “I didn’t take you for the nervous type, sir.”
I smirked back. “I hate waiting.”
At that moment, yellow lights began flashing and an alarm blared.
Looking ceilingward, Tredesceu said, “Looks like you don’t have to anymore.”
The tension drained from me like water from an unstoppered sink. “Well, that’s as clear a signal as I could hope for. Let’s get started.”
I walked to the stasis pod, took a deep breath, and pulled the emergency purge lever.
The chamber lid popped open, sending medigel flooding over my legs. Immediately, a second alarm began to blare. “Pavlov,” I called as I began undoing the restraints holding Astrid upright in the chamber. Pavlov caught the Emperor as she fell, and I sliced the respirator from her face. Her eyelids fluttered, but she did not awaken. I found the stimulant vials and pressed them into the hypospray, silently praying she would awaken quickly from her coma.
We strapped Astrid to Pavlov’s back, belts running under her armpits, across her chest, and around her waist, her bare feet dangling a foot off the ground, well before the turbolifts began moving. We kept her arms free in case she gained mobility there first, so she could serve as a tail gunner. Tredesceu and I watched as the bank of five turbolifts sprang to life, waiting to see which one would reach us first.
The second turbolift to the right dinged. Pavlov, Tredesceu, and I all fired our lancers through the door before it opened.
Blades bared, Tredesceu and I leapt into the crowded turbolift car, stabbing and slashing wildly, eviscerating and impaling anything larger than us which dared to move. Several frantic, bloody moments later, the two of us stood panting, covered in gore, but alive among a carpet of dead, dismembered demons. Pavlov joined us, somewhat put out at not having been able to join the fun, and Tredesceu and I set about looting the bodies of ammunition and weaponry as the turbolift doors shut. Before they closed completely, I heard the ding of another turbolift arriving.
The turbolift plummeted faster than gravity could manage, the gravitic floor keeping us from floating to the ceiling. We watched the vacuum spheres’ sides swell towardsus as we approached the spire’s midpoint. When they curved away again, we could see Darius’s diversion.
We needed no map to direct us to theRoyal Darius. The fan of dark, burning destruction emanating from the rightmost docking ring formed an arrow showing the route of our escape. Lancer bolts flashed, blasting craters in the subdivision walls, and strange arcs of fire sprayed out, igniting everything they touched with a sickly blue flame. The warning lights in this main chamber flashed crimson. Despite the water streaming from above like rain and the local fire-suppression foam, the flames continued to spread.
“Mother Earth, is he using chemical throwers?” Pavlov breathed.
“We learned from you,” Tredesceu said, his voice barely above a whisper.
Pavlov’s pupils were wide, drinking in the spectacle as we descended towards the central pyramid. “I wasn’t scolding. I’m impressed he would be so brutal.”
Having been subjected to chemical thrower attack, I suppressed the urge to gulp, ignored the instinctive desire to pull up my chem-repellent cloak to save me from the deadly spray of acid, poison, liquid fire, or whatever new horror the Empire had dreamt up for us this week.
“That’s unreasonably dangerous aboard a station like this,” I said. “He could overload the atmosphere scrubbers, if he doesn’t burn through the bloody hull first.”
Pavlov shook his head. “Hull’s too thick for jellied fire. You’d need a lancer to blast through.”
Our view of the ongoing assault was cut off as the central pyramid’s peak rose up to contain us. The gravitic compensators whined as the turbolift slowed, and I checked on Astrid, hoping to see her stirring towards wakefulness. To my dismay, she remained comatose.
I brandished a heavy Imperial lancer carbine as we exited the lift, with several spare pistols strapped to my harness. I needn’t have bothered – there were no armed soldiers waiting for us, only a few surprised cadets scrambling for weapons and ammunition belts in an interior armory, half of them still chewing their abandoned lunch as they girded themselves for battle. We hurried past them, firing a few wild shots to force them under cover, gaining precious seconds before they began calling in alarm. One tried to rush us, but despite being fully eleven feet tall and a demon to boot, he was no match against a human with a zeroblade. Tredesceu left him bleeding to death behind us.
My helmet radio crackled the moment we left the enclosed corridor into the central chamber, and Darius’s voice spoke. “Captain, where are you?”
“We’ve just exited the central pyramid and are heading your way, over,” I said, moving at a trot, my oversized carbine cradled in my arms.
“Roger. Moving to intercept.”
Astrid groaned, and Pavlov stopped. I told him to keep moving, but fell back to watch her. Her eyes fluttered, then squinted awake, her head lolling drunkenly from side to side as Pavlov carried her between a pair of two-story sub-structures.
“Astrid?” I asked.
