Heaven's Queen (42 page)

“We don’t have five minutes,” Brenton said calmly. “Listen.”

As though to prove his point, the rattling on the hull chose that moment to get exponentially louder, the metal grinding like someone was ripping it apart.

“I’ve done a lot of bad things in my time,” Brenton said. “So many sins I can’t possibly atone for. But this one thing I’m determined to do right.”

Rupert went stiff at his words, and Brenton took his chance to shove the younger symbiont away. Despite his injuries, the blow was still enough to knock Rupert off the button. The moment he was out of the way, Brenton stepped up to block the console with his body, holding the trigger like a last stand as he turned his ruined symbiont face to us.

“I’m dead,” he announced. “You’re not. Seems to me, then, that the way ahead is simple. I’ll hold this button as long as I can, you go and do what I should have done seventy years ago.” He nodded at Maat’s body in my arms. “Go and save her so we can both rest in peace at last.”

I looked at Rupert, but he was still staring at Brenton. Finally, he nodded. “Let’s go.”

I nodded back, gripping Maat to my chest as I turned to Brenton. “Don’t let go, whatever you do,” I warned, and then I shifted to King’s Tongue. “King’s rest be on you, John Brenton.”

“Of course it will,” he replied, and though I couldn’t see, I could hear the smile in his words. “I told you I was one of the good guys.”

If things had been less dire, I would have called bullshit on that. Brenton’s ends might have been well intentioned, but no one with any sort of conscience could ever call his methods “good.” If the situation were anything other than what it was, I would have told him exactly that. Now I could only turn and run for the door with Rupert at my heels.

The last sight I had of John Brenton, he was framed against the blood-smeared whiteness of Maat’s prison. His feet were braced against the plastic floor as he pinned his weight against the console, like he could somehow push the button down farther to buy us more time. But though the pool of blood at his feet was growing before my eyes, he did not falter and he did not move, not even when the entire station began to shake.

Even with no one left to run it, getting through the kill box was dangerous and annoying. The doors were all symbiont rated, which meant they were huge, stubborn slabs of metal, and several of the turrets were automated, including one really nasty disrupter cannon. If we’d tried to come in this way, we would have been shot full of holes before we reached the end of the second hall. Now, though, we had two circumstances in our favor: first, the entire station seemed to have abandoned their posts, leaving all the systems running on auto, and second, we were going through the kill box maze backward, out of Maat’s prison toward the lower security zones, which meant everything was facing the wrong way.

Rupert went first, opening each locked door from the inside and pulling down all the traps before they could turn to fire on us. But even with his speed, it was tricky work. Without a live person arming the guns, their movements were predictable, but they were still fast as hell. If they hadn’t had to turn completely around to fire backward every time, there was no way we could have managed it. As it was, Rupert was able to handle them all right, which was good, because I couldn’t seem to keep my mind on the task at hand.

The clanging against the hull was getting louder as we neared the center of the station. I could feel the vibrations through my boots as I ran, but while that was nerve-racking, it wasn’t actually the cause of the lump in my stomach. I wasn’t sure what was, but whenever Maat twitched in my arms, the feeling of doom grew stronger. The third time it happened, I gave in and flicked up my visor to have a look.

The moment my eyeballs took over for my camera feeds, the tiny dark kill box corridor filled with light. The flood of phantoms was a surprisingly welcome sight, but though I took comfort in the glow of the little aliens I’d started thinking of as allies somewhere along the line, my feeling of dread didn’t go away. Though we were running toward the station’s center, the phantoms were all going the other way, flowing past us like a swift river back toward Maat’s chamber.

That wouldn’t have been so odd except that the only time I ever saw phantoms move at anything other than a leisurely crawl was when they were trying to run away from me. I was trying to think what I could have done to scare so many of them when I realized the truth. These phantoms
were
running; they just weren’t running from
me
.

“Rupert.”

Rupert looked over his shoulder from where he was pulling down a drop turret.

“We have to go back.”

“Why?” Rupert asked, trashing the turret with a swipe of his claws. “What’s wrong?”

My eyes flicked over the mass exodus going on around us. “The phantoms are running the other way,” I said, knowing full well how dumb that sounded. “I don’t think we should keep going.”

“There is no other way out,” Rupert said, his calm strained. “We have to go this way.”

As he spoke, the loudest bang yet sounded directly above us. It was like something had crashed into the hull right above our heads. Maat jerked in my arms at the sound, her thin mouth falling open in a silent cry. Cursing, I moved her onto my shoulder so I could pull my gun. I didn’t know what I was going to shoot yet, but I felt better with Sasha in my hand. The whole time, my gut was telling me it was no good and we should run, but Rupert was right. Everything we’d done so far had been for one purpose: to get Maat onto a ship and into hyperspace. If this was the only way out to the station’s docks, then we had no choice.

“Let’s go fast, then,” I whispered, jogging up to the door he’d just cleared. “How much farther?”

“We’re almost there,” Rupert said, joining me. “Just a few mo—”

A deafening bang ate the rest of his words as the door we were standing at dented inward like it had been hit with a battering ram. A second blow came right on the heels of the first, and this time the heavy door broke, bashed off its hinges by a black hooked, armored tentacle as big as the hallway.

My first thought was that it was another emperor phantom coming for me like back on the battleship, but when Rupert shouted in surprise and jumped back, I knew I was wrong, because he could see it, too. Still, it wasn’t until the tentacle withdrew and a huge, bulbous head started wedging itself through the door that I realized at last what was going on.

“Lelgis!”

I should have known, I thought bitterly as we retreated down the tiny hall. Should have guessed. The clanging on the hull around us was louder than ever, but now I recognized it. It was the sound of squids tearing the station apart, ripping open the metal to get to me. And if the lelgis were
here
, that meant the emperor phantoms who’d been keeping them back must have been defeated, which would also explain why the power was still on even though we’d removed Maat from her prison. I didn’t think we’d be getting reinforcements, either. My visor was still up, but I couldn’t even see the phantom’s glow anymore. The hallway was now completely empty of even the tiniest phantoms. It was down to us and the lelgis.

Well, that was fine with me, I thought, dropping my visor with a growl. I owed the damn squids for my leg. From the bits I’d seen, this looked to be the same armored lelgis Brenton and I had fought on the asteroid, the one that had bounced Sasha’s shot. I wasn’t about to eat another of my own bullets, so I slammed Sasha into her holster and reached for Mia instead, dialing up her charge as I yelled at Rupert, “Go!”

He obeyed, slashing at the lelgis with his claws, forcing it to retreat back through the door. At the same time, I fired a narrow slug of white fire straight at the base where the thing’s barbed tentacles connected to its body. The squid might ignore gravity, but with no room to dodge in the small tunnel and Rupert occupying its attention, it didn’t even get a shield up in time before my plasma shotgun’s blast slammed into its body.

The burning slug hit its tender flesh like a rock splashing into a pond, and for a moment, I could actually see the white fire spreading through it. But just like every other one of these bastards I’d fought, this lelgis didn’t seem to feel pain. Even while it was burning, it kept coming, shooting its barbed tentacle up to grab Rupert’s chest.

He sliced it out of the air, stabbing his claws into the appendage that had been grabbing for him and yanking it forward instead. The lelgis fought back with a vengeance, writhing against Rupert’s grip, but even the squid’s strength was no match for Rupert’s as he pulled it forward and stabbed his free hand deep into the burning hole I’d made.

“Go!” he shouted as he ripped the tentacle free at the base. “Run for the dock!”

He didn’t have to tell me twice. I darted forward, vaulting over the wounded lelgis’ wildly thrashing body with Rupert right behind me. I had Maat slung over my left shoulder and Mia in my hand, ready to fire again, but the next hallway was much bigger than the one we’d just left. We’d cleared the kill box at last, I realized, my hopes soaring. We were back in the station proper, but while that was enough to make me want to cheer, I didn’t know which way to go.

Fortunately, Rupert did. “This way,” he said, sprinting past me. “Follow this to the end, then down the stairs and—”

He cut off with a grunt as something slammed into him. It hit me a second later, and the impact was enough to knock my breath clean out. As I struggled to get it back, my suit informed me that I’d hit a tentacle, a huge one that had shot out of one of the side corridors to bar our path. That was news to me, because from the way my stomach felt, I’d have guessed we ran into a metal bar. As it was, the blow was so hard and unexpected that my stabilizers couldn’t keep me up. All I could do I as fell backward was curl over to make sure I didn’t crush Maat when I hit.

As always, Rupert recovered before I did. He was up and at my side before I’d finished landing, yanking me back to my feet. But even after I was up, we didn’t move. We couldn’t. In the time it had taken us to recover, every way we could have escaped had been blocked.

The hallway we were in was much larger than the squirrelly little corridors of the kill box maze. This was the sort of wide, efficient passage you could drive a fully stocked supply loader down with room to spare, and every inch of it, from the flat industrial lights overhead to the scuffed metal floor, was packed full of lelgis.

There were tall, dainty lelgis perched on spindly legs like the one I’d jumped over back on the asteroid and heavy ones with barbed tentacles like the creature Rupert and I had left writhing in the doorway. There were squat lelgis with armored heads and long lelgis that looked more like snakes, and others so alien my brain had trouble making sense of them. There were lelgis no larger than dogs and lelgis so huge they had to double over to fit beneath the hall’s twelve-foot ceiling. Still more lelgis were packed in behind the ones we could see, their bodies forming a mottled wall of purples and blues and blacks under the station’s harsh white lights. But even though the aliens had us completely surrounded, they didn’t move in for the kill.

“Why aren’t they attacking?” I whispered, putting my back to Rupert’s.

“I think they’re afraid of you,” he whispered back.

That didn’t make sense. We’d just been smacked with a tentacle, and the lelgis we’d cut up in the hall hadn’t had a problem attacking us. But as I thought about it, I realized the lelgis we’d cut down hadn’t been after
us
; it had been after
Rupert
. Other than the one I’d just run headfirst into, not a single tentacle had touched me or Maat despite ample opportunity to do so, and that gave me courage.

I bared my teeth and took a threatening step forward, and then broke into a grin when the wall of lelgis inched back. I was about to tell Rupert to follow me, that I was busting us out of here, but when I glanced at him through my rear camera, my heart almost stopped.

One lelgis had entered the clear circle the others had left around us. It was huge, filling the hallway, its head brushing the ceiling as it floated forward on a cloud of tentacles that looked soft as a cloud, but it wasn’t the size that got me. Actually, compared to the last time I’d seen it, the lelgis was practically a miniature. What got me was that I
had
seen it before. The lelgis in front of me was black as pitch, its shape the same as the dark shadows I’d seen skittering at the edge of the emperor phantom’s light both in the oneness and behind the wall of ships outside. It was the queen, I realized as my throat went dry. And it was coming for me.

Peace, death bringer.

The words floated through my mind like a warm summer wind, bringing with them a feeling of calm and confidence, a crisis managed. All around us, the writhing lelgis fell still, and I had the sudden uncanny feeling that the crowd of aliens that had boxed us in wasn’t a crowd at all, but pieces of a whole commanded entirely by the entity in front of me. I set my jaw. Queen indeed.

“Back off,” I said, my voice sneering with false bravado. “You don’t order me around.”

I felt Rupert tense beside me, and his head turned quizzically. I thought this was because he couldn’t hear the lelgis talking in my head, but then I realized he was looking around like he didn’t see the giant black thing in front of us at all.

He doesn’t.

I winced at the pity that came with the lelgis’ words, and then, before I could shout a warning, the black queen reached out and flicked a tentacle at Rupert’s chest.

The unexpected impact sent him flying, and he crashed headlong into the wall of lelgis behind us. The queen’s amusement suffused my mind when he hit, but I was too busy to care. I was already running to help him. Before I’d taken two steps, though, the queen’s black tentacles flew up in front of me, blocking my path, and as she encircled me, all light vanished.

I stumbled in the sudden darkness, cursing as the familiar, weightless feeling of the oneness clamped down on me like a trap.

“
No!
” I screamed, flailing wildly. I didn’t even know what I was doing, other than fighting, shoving against the darkness like I could bust through it and get to where Rupert was. He was no pushover, but even he couldn’t possibly fight so many on his own. I had to reach him, I thought frantically. I had to save him.