The hole Colloway shot in the ship goes three decks deep. Sparks from broken instruments crackle. Molecular armor on the hull clatters as it seals the breach behind us, locking us in.
Tongueless clicks over the com and appears from two decks below. He boosts up and assembles the ripWing cannon he and Rhonna harvested from the graveyard, hooking the man-sized gun to his armor’s homemade exoskeleton. Thraxa pulls herself from a mangled wall. Her fox warhelm is dented. A sharp piece of metal sticks through her lower guts and out the back of her armor. She bends the points of the metal shard down and looks toward the sound of enemies coming up from the lower decks and down the main corridor.
I toss a grenade down to the lower decks. White light flares and a concussion thunders. I peek out into the main corridor.
Masked men in tactical gear move like a hunched organism down the hall. I dip my head back just as bullets chew into the wall and it starts to melt.
“Tongueless, give ’em a lick.”
Tongueless levers the ripWing cannon forward on its hydraulic arm while Thraxa braces him from behind. The cannon is meant for ships. Not men. It screams toroids of energy down the hall, bucking the Obsidian into Thraxa. The frame rate of the world stutters. Behind Tongueless, Thraxa pulls her warhammer from its magnetic holster. Alexandar salutes me with his blade and turns to the main corridor.
Kaleidoscopic carnage unfolds before us.
“Pup Two, go for drill,” I say to Rhonna.
“Copy.”
“Invert,” I order. All except Tongueless rotate boots to ceiling. “One hundred meters to the Package. Push.”
We charge into the wake of Tongueless’s maelstrom. Everything is upside down. The very air ripples with heat. Body parts steam all over the floor. Half-melted doorways tilt. The main corridor runs the spine of the ship. It is the most direct route to the prison cells. But it means we will be flanked in seconds. We must punch through, or it’s all on Rhonna.
There’s a blur at the far end of the corridor. Drones scream for us, spitting munitions. Three of us open up with our pulseFists. Shrapnel pings everywhere. Then the Gorgons come to play.
Dozens of elite guerrillas fire around corners, but we roll down the ceiling like an upside-down wrecking ball made of energy, razors, and hammers.
I fire point-blank into a Gorgon’s chest, killing the armored man behind him as well. The third bends impossibly and squeezes three shots at my head. But I’m already past him and firing my fist at an Obsidian.
A homing grenade clatters against my right thigh. I cut it off with my razor and Alexandar kicks it. It detonates ten meters in front of us, lifting us backward.
“Push.”
I was a killer at sixteen. A warlord by twenty. But the younger me wasn’t this. He was still tender and new to war. If he was the Helldiver, I am the clawDrill.
I carve through hardcore veterans of the Zero Legion as if they were made of pastry. Still, they pour from every hall. Existence is smoke and fire. My armor pings. Internal warnings scream. I flicker my pulseShields on and off, letting them cool so I don’t cook. The Gorgons will not die easy, and there are too many.
We’re pinned. Flanked on three sides and can’t push forward. Tongueless fires back down the main corridor, sweeping it clear. Something hits him from his right. A hole smokes in his armor. He stumbles as I fire at his assailant and overlap my shields to guard him as he recovers.
“Slide.”
Alexandar seamlessly takes point and fires down the hall. Thraxa rotates to take his position. Tongueless recovers and takes hers. Alexandar flickers down the hall like a possessed flame, lashing out his razor in abject slaughter, inverting gravity better than any man I’ve ever seen save maybe Sevro. He tries to break through the crack fireteam barring our path.
“Hull penetration,” Rhonna intones. “Breaching.”
The Gorgon fireteam perform a perfect Flavinian armorkill on Alexandar. Three nail him with electrical rounds before he reaches them, lowering his pulseShield. Two deliver mass slugs that stun him senseless. He teeters there like a drunk. Their centurion delivers the coup de grâce. His muzzle flashes. Three armor-penetrating digger rounds scream toward Alexandar’s head.
Thraxa bolts forward and the rounds sizzle as they ricochet off her intact pulseShield. One penetrates and rips a hole through her left shoulder, spinning her sideways.
“Slide!”
I rotate into her place, rocketing into that damn fireteam on my gravBoots to kill the entire lot. As their bodies drip off my armor and my friends fight behind me, I look down the smoke-filled corridor to see a red heart burning in the gloom. A white skull joins it.
Two silhouettes bar our path to the prisons. The razors of the Olympic Knights glimmer like teeth. The heart and skull emblems of their office glow on their breastplates. The Love Knight and the Death Knight.
Where is the Storm Knight?
Where is Aja’s only son?
I pray to a silent god he is not with Orion.
I look left, Gorgons. Right, Gorgons. Then behind us to see three hundred and fifty pounds of apex predator crouched in the corridor, his black and gray leopard warhelm lowered for the hunt.
Ajax.
“Pup Two, we’ve got the Olympics. You’re clear. On me,” I bark.
We launch away from Ajax for Love and Death. Each side in gravBoots and inverting gravity at will. Metal rings as we crash together. Death and I slam into the wall, the ceiling, the floor, smashing Gorgons still in their desert gear. We fire our pulseFists at the same time and melt each other’s into oblivion. The force sends us reeling into the Love Knight and Alexandar, who engage in a far more graceful duel of blades. Alexandar turns Love to Thraxa, who is just completing a huge swing of her hammer. Then Death bowls into Thraxa from the side, guarding his wingman’s back.
Behind them, Tongueless unloads his cannon on Ajax. I’ve never seen one close so fast as Aja’s boy. He ricochets along the ceiling toward Tongueless, and then slashes down to slide sparking across the floor, flat on his back. Because the recoil of the cannon pulls its barrel upward, Tongueless is slow to angle it back down.
Ajax counted on it.
He slides past Tongueless. His wrist flicks. His slide stops and he pivots to the Root Cutter stance of the Willow Way. One of the last and most complicated forms his mother would have taught him before my friends and I killed her.
Tongueless falls into four pieces, dead before he even hits the floor.
“Thraxa! Hold for me!” I shout as she charges Ajax. She is fast, impossibly strong, tough as nails. But Ajax was born of the unholy genetic union of two apex bloodlines: Raa and Grimmus. He is her superior in every martial way except experience, and in that he’s gaining.