“Honored guests. Friends. On behalf of Greater Clan Battle Leader de Stoy and myself, welcome to the first day of this Galactic Summit.”
I reach a massive heavy-duty door, marked with diagonal black-and-yellow stripes. Four more dead bodies are scattered on the ground in front of it. A sign is painted across the metal in large white letters:
WARNING: REACTOR CORE. NO UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY BEYOND THIS POINT.
The lighting around suddenly dims, turning blood-red.
“Oh Maker, not yet,” I pray.
26
KAL
Sempiternity is on fire.
Her hull is torn wide, leaking fuel and coolant into the void. The leak is ablaze, an arc of flames cutting across the dark, aglow with hundreds of tiny points of light. Each of them is a ship, Free Peoples or Ra’haam, friend or foe, all of them fighting and dying for this tiny chance at life.
“G Wing, you have incoming Ra’haam fighters! Mark six—”
“Roger, Trinity, this is the Do’Kiat, we are moving to intercept—”
“Maker’s breath, they’re all over us! We—”
In the Neridaa’s control room, the battle is projected all around us, as if the crystal walls were glass. I stand beside Aurora, watching all of it unfold, heart in my throat. Out in the black, new stars bloom briefly, missiles weave, tentacles clutch, the gutted hulks of wrecked ships list helpless, bleeding and burning. The Free Peoples of the galaxy fight with the kind of bravery that legends are spun from, that songs are sung of.
But if we fail here, there will be no one left to sing them.
And the Ra’haam is so many… .
“Hull integrity seventeen percent! We need help over—”
“Reading new bogies, multiple—”
“I’m hit! I—”
My mind is a storm, my father’s and my be’shmai’s power echoing inside my skull, charging the air with static. Midnight blue and blood-red, even here in the black-and-white colorscape of the Fold, intertwined in a symphony of destruction. Crushing corrupted ships around us to bloody smears and, always and ever, pushing the Neridaa forward—a spear of Eshvaren crystal the size of a city, flying at near-relativity-bending speeds toward our target.
It is hidden, slumbering out in the midst of all this gray, but …
“There!” I cry, pointing. “There it is!”
Beyond the bloodshed ahead, the ships killing and dying across the dark before us, the Fold ripples, as if a stone had been skimmed across its surface. Though space is soundless, I swear I hear a faint string of notes, beautiful and shimmering and tingling upon my skin.
Before us, I see it, just as I saw it back then—a tiny whirlpool of blacks and grays and whites, unfurling like a flower beneath a springtime sun. As if reacting to the presence of the Eshvaren’s Triggers. As if it knows …
“The gate,” I breathe, heart singing.
My father glances toward it, then back to the battle outside. Aurora is lost in the carnage, blood-slicked teeth bared as she seizes another Ra’haam ship and crushes it to splinters. But before my eyes, the portal spirals out, widening like an aperture, until it spans thousands of kilometers across—the gateway to the pocket dimension that hides the Eshvaren homeworld.
Briefly I remember the last time we came here—Aurora and Finian and Scarlett and Zila and I. That was a simpler time. A better time. I recall the warmth of their friendship, the joy I felt when our squad was all together, the feeling that, as one, we could somehow accomplish anything.
Despite the carnage around us, I find myself smiling at the memory. I thank the Void most of them did not live to see a future such as this. And I vow, with all inside me, that I will give everything I have to prevent it from happening again.
“Aurora, do you se—”
An impact rocks the Neridaa’s hull, crystal falling from the gables overhead and shattering on the ground beside me. My father glances from the projection, his right eye burning a furious, blinding white.
“Careful, girl!” he snarls.
Aurora wipes at the blood on her lips, ghost light spilling through the cracks around her eye. “I thought you had that one!”
“I cannot watch our flanks, bow, and stern! Concentrate!”
“I am! And I’d find that a lot easier without you shouting at me, you f—”
Another blast shakes us, the walls splintering as Aurora stumbles.
“Okay, that one was your fault!”
“Kal, this is Tyler, you read?”
I touch the comm at my ear, speaking swift. “Yes, Brother. The gateway to the Eshvaren homeworld is dead ahead.”
“We see it! But word is definitely out across the Ra’haam hive mind now! We got two more Weed battle fleets inbound, and our strength is down to forty-seven, no … forty-three percent.”
I look at the anomaly, teeth gritted, willing us on with every fiber of my being. “We are almost there. Hold on.”
“Is the Ra’haam going to be able to follow you across?”
I look to Aurora, but she is lost once more in the elation of the battle outside. My father glowers at the enemy, blood dribbling down his chin to spatter on the floor. But I can tell by the slight lift of one brow …
“We do not know,” I confess. “Possibly.”
“Roger that. We’ll cover you as best we … Oh great Maker …”
Light blazes off our stern, impossible and blinding. Amid the swarm of Ra’haam ships, dark shadows across a darker sky, I see Sempiternity lit from within, like a fire float on a festival day.
Her hull cracks and her body shakes, and I can only watch helpless as her core ruptures. With one final, silent scream of light, the World Ship blows apart, and I wince at the faint echoes of ten thousand lives being taken into the Void’s embrace.
“Amna diir,” I whisper.
“No … ,” Aurora breathes, tears aglow in her shining eyes.
“… Jie-Lin …”
The voice rings in the emptiness around us, warm as springtime, oily and slick. And through her grief, her battle-born fire, I see Aurora’s jaw clench.
“… Jie-Lin …”
“Ignore it, girl,” my father warns.
“I am.”
“It seeks to distract you, it—”
“LOOK, SHUT UP, WILL YOU?”
The gateway looms ahead, filling our view: an eternal spiral, the secrets of the Ancients just beyond. We hit the threshold, thunder past, as the grays and whites and blacks of the Fold suddenly, painfully flare into full and vibrant color—a rainbow-hued thunderclap ringing in my skull.
The gateway ripples behind us, like water, like blood, and my heart sinks as I see Ra’haam vessels riding the shock wave of our passing, flooding through the wound we have torn.
The battle spills over into realspace.
Sempiternity is gone.
We have nowhere to run now.
Free Peoples ships follow the Ra’haam vessels, the Vindicator among them, Tyler and his crew riding beside us to the end. Ahead, I see the homeworld of the Ancients—once a place of beauty and music and light, now dead and gray. But more enemies are coming through the spinning breach behind us, seemingly endless in number, the ruins of a once-beautiful, kaleidoscopic galaxy now rotten and lost. Twisted into one mind, one view, one will, bent to one awful purpose.