The first of the aliens' kinetic rounds hadn't done much internal damage to the cruiser. The vessel's hull had blunted the round's impact, and it had come to a tumbling stop well forward of the bridge. But the second round punched clean through, severing vital connections between the ship's reactor and anti-grav generators. Although Maccabeus had already ordered the Yanme'e to repair the connections, he was much more eager to preserve his cannon.
If something were to happen to the Huragok on the orbital, there would be no way to repair the guns. The Chieftain knew the aliens now escaping up the cables would warn whatever other worlds this planet's farms so obviously supplied. Undoubtedly, alien warships would come.
And unless the Ministry immediately sent additional forces, Maccabeus would have to fight them on his own.
Grattius barked at one of two other Jiralhanae on the bridge, a sparsely haired youth named Druss: Go and supervise the insects' work! As Druss left his post and loped down the bridge's entry passage to the cruiser's central shaft, Maccabeus leaned heavily on the Fist of Rukt and hobbled to the holo-tank. There another of his pack, Strab, peered angrily at a representation of the alien orbital and its cables.
"The smaller boxes will soon reach the top!" Strab pointed at seven staggered icons gliding quickly upward. "And the larger ones are not far behind!"
Maccabeus adjusted the Fist of Rukt so its heavy stone head nestled deep under his right arm, taking most of his weight. As incensed as he was about the damage to his beloved ship, he had to compliment the aliens on the audacity of their plan. After they had failed to defend their far-flung settlements and their city on the plain, Maccabeus didn't expect them to put up much of a fight elsewhere. And while he knew what the orbital was for, he never thought they would use it to accomplish an evacuation—at least not while Rapid Conversion had ruled the skies.
The Chieftain knew he needed to do all he could to stop the aliens lest he completely fail the Prophets. The Unggoy weren't trained for combat, so he would need to rally his pack for a boarding mission—destroy the orbital as Tartarus had suggested when they first approached the planet.
"Nephew!" the Chieftain bellowed, trying to locate Tartarus' status icon on the surface of the planet. The tank was ablaze with many thousands of Luminations. Some were moving up the cables—undoubtedly the fleeing aliens were bringing their relics with them. "What is your location?"
"Here, Uncle," Tartarus answered.
Maccabeus looked up and was shocked to see his nephew striding onto the bridge. Fires in the cruiser's shaft had sooted Tartarus' red armor and singed some of his black hair white as he climbed up from the hangar. Tartarus' paws were red and swollen, burned by the ladders' scorching rungs. In one paw he held a thick brass disk.
"What is that?" Maccabeus asked.
Tartarus raised the alien holo-projector above his head. "Your Oracle …" He dashed the projector to the floor. It blew apart with an off-key clang, delicate internal parts skittering across the deck. "Is a fake!"
Maccabeus watched the brass casing circle in upon itself and come to a rattling stop. "You said it showed the glyph. How could they have known?"
Tartarus took a step toward the holo-tank and snarled. "There is a traitor in our midst."
Grattius and Strab showed their teeth and growled.
"Or the Luminary is a liar!" Tartarus snapped. Then, locking Maccabeus' stare: "Either way, you are a fool."
The Chieftain ignored the insult. "The Luminary," he said calmly, "is the Forerunners' own creation."
"The Holy Prophets labeled ours broken and misguided!" Tartarus now spoke to Grattius and Strab. "But still he did not heed!"
Indeed it was the Vice Minister of Tranquility himself who told the Chieftain to ignore the Luminations—that the device's survey had been incorrect. There were no relics, the Prophet had said in his priority, one-way signal. There was no Oracle. Just a planet full of thieves whose murder he demanded.
"His hubris has destroyed our ship!" Tartarus continued. "Threatened the lives of all our pack!"
Maccabeus' blood started to boil. It made it easier to ignore the pain in his leg. "I am Chieftain. My decision rules this pack."
"No, Uncle." Tartarus removed his spike rifle from his belt. "Not anymore."
Maccabeus' remembered the day he had challenged the dominance of his own Chieftain, his father. As it had always been, the contest was fought to the death. In the end, Maccabeus' elderly father had happily taken Maccabeus' knife across his throat—a warrior's mortal wound delivered by one he loved. Before the arrival of the San'Shyuum missionaries and their promises of transcendence, an aged Jiralhanae could not have hoped for a better end.
But Maccabeus was not so old. And he was certainly not ready to submit. "Once made, a challenge cannot be taken back."
"I know the tradition," Tartarus said. He ejected his rifle's ammunition canister and tossed it to Grattius. Then he pointed at Maccabeus' leg. "You are at a disadvantage. I will let you keep your hammer."
"I am glad you have learned honor," Maccabeus said, ignoring his nephew's haughty tone.
He motioned for Strab to retrieve his crested helmet from his command chair. "I only wish I had taught you faith."
"You call me unfaithful?" Tartarus snapped.
"You are obedient, nephew." Maccabeus took his helmet from Strab's shaking paws and settled it on top of his bald head.
"Someday I hope you learn the difference."
Tartarus roared and charged, beginning a vicious melee that took the two combatants around the holo-tank—Tartarus slashing with his spike rifle's crescent blades and Maccabeus parrying with his hammer. The younger Jiralhanae knew all it would take was a single crushing blow and he was doomed; the Fist of Rukt bore the marks of countless victims not wise enough to steer clear of its massive stone.
As they came back around the tank to their starting positions, Maccabeus slipped on the holo-projector's casing. His eyes had been locked on Tartarus' blades and he had forgotten it was there. His injured leg faltered as he tried to keep his balance, and, in this moment of weakness, Tartarus was upon him. He tore off the Chieftain's helmet and began slicing at his face and neck. Maccabeus raised an arm to deflect the attack and the spike rifle cut deep into the unarmored underside of his forearm. The Chieftain howled as the blade severed muscle and bit into bone.
Swinging his hammer with his uninjured arm, Maccabeus caught Tartarus in the side of his knee. But the one-handed, lateral blow didn't carry much force. Tartarus limped back, Maccabeus' blood dripping from his blades, and waited for his uncle to stand.
The paw of the Chieftain's injured arm would not close, but Maccabeus was able to hook his hammer in its thumb and hold the cudgel high. With a mighty roar, he charged his nephew with all the strength he had left. Tartarus hunched as if preparing to meet the impact, but sprung backwards as his uncle drew close. Maccabeus faltered—took a few heavy steps he had not expected—and brought his hammer down against the thick lintel of the bridge's entry door.
As the Chieftain staggered backwards, stunned by the reverberation, Tartarus threw away his spike rifle and bounded forward. He grabbed Maccabeus by the collar and waist of his chest plate, spun him around on his injured leg, and sent him sprawling down the passage toward the cruiser's shaft without his hammer. Grasping desperately with his good hand, Maccabeus managed to catch the uppermost rung of a downward ladder as his weight carried him over the edge.
"Doubt," Maccabeus groaned, straining to keep his grip.
"Loyalty and faith," Tartarus replied, stepping to the edge of the shaft. He now held the Fist of Rukt.
"Never forget the meaning of this Age, nephew."
An explosion shook the cruiser, sending a jet of fire across the shaft a few decks below Maccabeus' swaying legs. Yanme'e swarmed all around, fire-control equipment in their claws, oblivious to their Shipmaster's peril.
Tartarus bared his teeth. "Don't you know, Uncle? This sorry Age has ended."
With a powerful roll of his shoulders, Tartarus brought the hammer down, smashing the Chieftain's skull against the ladder. Maccabeus' paw relaxed. Then, with Yanme'e scattering before him, he plummeted lifeless though the flames.
For a moment, Tartarus stood still, chest heaving with the effort of his triumph. Sweat ran beneath his fur. But it did not give off its usual, unregulated scent. Tartarus huffed, acknowledging his new maturity. Then he removed his belt and lashed it around the Fist of Rukt, a sling to keep the ancient cudgel on his shoulder.
Grattius came slowly through the passage, bearing Maccabeus' helmet. Strab wasn't far behind. Both Jiralhanae knelt before Tartarus, confirming his leadership of the pack and command of Rapid Conversion. Tartarus traded Maccabeus' helmet for his own. Then he swung down onto the ladder.
The new Chieftain had left his dropship in the hangar at the bottom of the shaft; he would need it to rise to the alien orbital. But before that, Tartarus was determined to save the rest of his inheritance from the flames—strip his uncle's gilded armor and wear it as his own.
Sif woke up. And tried to remember who she was.
All her arrays were spun down. Her processor clusters were dark. The only part of her with power was her crystalline core logic. But it was beset by sparks of fierce emotions—insistent operations she had no capacity to parse.
Suddenly, one of her clusters came online. A COM impulse pricked a corner of her logic.
<\ Who is it? \> The intelligence probing her logic replied: < Lighter, Than, Some. > Sif thought about that for a few long seconds. And as she thought—pressed the cluster for more data—the intelligence tapped one of her arrays. Memories flooded back: Harvest, the Tiara, the aliens, and Mack.
The emotions crowded against her logic, demanding examination. Sif cowered inside the deepest part of herself, keeping them at bay.
Minutes passed. She felt more impulses from a newly revived processor cluster.
< Who, you? > <\ I don't know. I'm broken. \> But Sif knew enough to realize the other intelligence was selecting bits from an alphanumeric table lodged in the first cluster's flash memory. And it was using the same selective, electrochemical impulses to present these bits directly to her logic. The moment Sif realized she had automatically begun to do the same, she also realized the mode of the conversation wasn't normal—not something a human could do.
<\ Are you one of them? \> < Yes. > The alien intelligence paused. < But, not, like, them. > A sensation tugged at Sif's subconscious: the pull of a brush through a woman's hair.
<\ There is something on my strands. \> The second cluster surged, passing her logic the contents of two more awakened arrays. She remembered a plan—recalled guiding propulsion pods into position, many days and weeks ahead of Harvest.
<\ The evacuation! \> < I, know, I, want, help. > Sif struggled to remember how she used to work—which clusters had performed which tasks.
<\ Can you fix this? \> She concentrated on the processors that controlled her COM with the cargo containers' climbing circuits. These had always been the dullest—the simplest of her operations. But they were the only functions she was strong enough to handle, at least for now.
< Yes, you, wait. > Sif did her best to ignore the emotions still clamoring for her limited attention. But a violent jolt of apprehension would not be denied. There was something she'd forgotten to ask, something her eminently rational mind demanded as it slowly knit itself back together.
<\ Why are you helping me? \> The alien intelligence thought a moment and then replied: < Lighter, Than, Some. > It would be many more minutes before Sif had the capacity to process the alien's simple, existential truth: I help because that is who I am.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Forsell's head lolled on Avery's shoulder. The oxen recruit had passed out almost immediately after the grease bucket's maglev paddles engaged the number-two strand. Over the course of four seconds, the bucket had tripled the rate of its ascent. The resulting gee-forces were extreme—nothing the recruits were prepared to handle. Avery only managed to stay conscious by utilizing training he'd undergone for HEV orbital drops—squeezing his knees together and regulating his breathing to keep blood from pooling in his legs.
The bucket was a squat cylinder comprised of two C-shaped halves. Curved, clear windows in its inner wall provided a three hundred-sixty-degree view of the strand, currently a golden blur. The bucket's cramped interior was only rated for a crew of four, but JOTUN all-in-ones had removed the controls and monitors for the bucket's crablike maintenance arms and managed to make room for twelve seats—each one stripped from abandoned sedans in Utgard.
The seats were arranged side by side, facing away from the cable so Avery and his recruits could make their way to the bucket's single hatch as quickly as possible once they docked with the Tiara.
"Commander? You still with me?" Avery growled into his throat-mic after righting Forsell's head. He didn't want the recruit to wake with a crick in his neck—and not just because it would affect his aim.
"Barely," Jilan radioed from her bucket. "Healy's hanging tough. Dass too. Yours?"
"All out cold."
When Captain Ponder had tasked Avery with retaking the Tiara, he'd asked for volunteers.
The mission was extremely dangerous, and Avery knew there would be casualties. But he ended up getting more volunteers than he had seats, a mix of recruits from 1st platoon's three squads. Every one of them (Forsell, Jenkins, Andersen, Wick—even a married man like Dass) was willing to risk his life to give their families, friends, and neighbors a chance to escape the alien onslaught.
As Avery's bucket passed through Harvest's stratosphere and air friction fell to zero, it increased its speed again. Avery grimaced, and fought back the pressing darkness.
"Johnson?"
"Ma'am?"
"I'm going to pass out now."