28. Gnash #2
The merchant stares up at me from the floor. “My thanks, Lord Gnash.”
“Thank me by crawling.”
He crawls.
I reach the door panel and tear away the fused cover with one hand. Heat bites into my palm. The manual mechanism beneath is slagged nearly solid.
The injured Reaper woman looks at me through smoke-reddened eyes. “Lord, the children.”
“I see them.”
The human boy clings to her good arm. His face is wet with tears and gray with dust. He cannot be more than five or six. Too small for this. Every child is too small for this, but some truths become sharper when they have a face.
“What is your name?” I ask him.
His mouth trembles. “Tomas.”
“Tomas, I need you to cover your ears again.”
He obeys.
I drive my claws into the seam of the shelter door.
The first pull does nothing.
Pain travels up my arms as the warped metal refuses me. The door is pressure-rated, built to hold against fire, vacuum, and debris. Sensible engineering. Obnoxious engineering. I plant one foot against the wall, curl both hands into the seam, and pull again.
Metal shrieks.
The sound vibrates through my bones.
Behind me, someone begins to sing.
One voice first.
Low.
Rough.
Reaper.
Then another joins.
The injured woman.
Then a worker.
Then three civilians who do not know the words but understand need when it fills the air.
The corridor trembles with the harmonic.
Reaper song is not pretty in the way court musicians like to define pretty.
It is old pressure, grief made into force, hunger disciplined into sound.
The vibration gathers in my chest and arms, wraps around the warped door, and makes reality remember that metal is less stubborn than survival.
I pull a third time.
The door tears open.
Civilians surge through, guided by emergency workers into the shelter. I hold the frame while the damaged mechanism tries to close crookedly. The injured woman pushes Tomas ahead of her, then falters.
I catch her before she falls.
“My arm,” she grits out.
“Still attached.”
“Barely.”
“Barely counts.”
She laughs once through pain, and I carry her through the doorway while the last civilians scramble inside. The shelter marshal on the other side is a Vakutan woman with soot across her pink-scaled face and a plasma pistol on her hip.
“Seal it behind us,” I say.
“The mechanism is torn half to hell.”
“Then flatter it.”
She looks at the door, then at me. “That your technical order, lord?”
“Yes.”
“Terrible order.”
“Carry it out.”
She grins despite the smoke. “Yes, lord.”
The shelter is crowded, hot, and loud with frightened breathing.
Children huddle beneath thermal blankets.
Merchants sit with hands pressed over wounds.
A Pi’Rell woman whispers comfort to an Alzhon child in a language I do not know.
The air smells of antiseptic foam, sweat, burned cloth, and the sharp mineral tang of emergency water rations. Every face turns toward me.
That is the burden, more than the map, more than the fleets.
Faces.
People who need me to be larger than fear because my name is what stands between them and the dark.
Tomas pushes free of the injured woman and runs to a human female near the back of the shelter. His mother, I assume, from the way she makes a broken sound and crushes him to her chest. The sight lands in me harder than the door did.
The mother looks over his head.
“Thank you,” she says.
I nod because words are dangerous in that moment.
My comm crackles.
Skahar’s voice fills my ear. “If you have finished making dramatic entrances, the station remains under attack.”
I touch the comm. “Your concern warms me.”
“My concern curdled decades ago. Return before Vakka decides command suits her.”
“She would be efficient.”
“She would paint the walls with officers who annoy her, and then we would have decorating concerns.”
I look once more around the shelter.
Then I step back into the corridor.
By the time I return to the command center, the second attack wave has been repelled and the third has begun.
The room smells worse than before. More smoke.
More blood. More bodies packed into too little air.
A medic tapes a sealant strip across Vakka’s temple while she snarls coordinates through clenched teeth.
Krell’s voice has gone hoarse. Skahar stands exactly where I left him, but the old hand on his cane is white-knuckled beneath the dark skin.
“Report,” I say.
Vakka does not bother looking impressed by my arrival. “Sector Twelve breach contained. Dock Nine fire suppressed. Southern approach clear after Coalition pursuit. Ash-Maw cluster withdrew. Debris-field attackers remain active and have launched two boarding pods toward the old refinery arm.”
“Intercept?”
“Batteries disabled one. The other slipped through.”
My rage flares. “Where?”
“Service spine near civilian storage.”
Of course.
They do not strike command. They do not strike weapons. They strike where frightened people hide food, blankets, personal keepsakes, and the little luxuries that make survival feel less like waiting to die.
“Send warriors,” I say.
“Already moving,” Krell answers.
Skahar watches me with old, sharp eyes. “You ran to Sector Twelve.”
“I am aware of my movements.”
“You tore open a shelter door.”
“It was in my way.”
“You carried a wounded woman.”
“She weighed less than my irritation.”
“Do not make jokes at me, boy.”
The word cuts through the room more surely than a shouted title.
Boy.
The officers nearest us find urgent reasons to study their displays.
I turn toward him. “This is not the hour.”
“It is exactly the hour,” Skahar says. “You think leadership is being strong enough to carry every wounded woman, break every door, kill every enemy, answer every call, and bleed in every corridor. That is captain thinking. Glorious. Useless. Addictive.”
My hands tighten.
“Choose your next words with care, old one.”
“No.”
His refusal lands flat and fearless.
Skahar steps closer until he has to tilt his head to look up at me. His broken horn catches the red light. His cloudy eye shows me no mercy.
“You want to pay your debt with your body because bodies are simple. Bodies can run, tear, kill, carry, and die. Leadership is worse. Leadership is deciding which door remains closed because another must open first. Leadership is listening to one child scream while saving twenty elsewhere. Leadership is accepting help from a snake because the medicine is real. Leadership is admitting your rage made music for your enemies and choosing a different song before all of us are forced to sing funeral verses.”
The command center fades around his words.
I want to snarl.
I want to tell him he knows nothing of the weight on me, which would be absurd because he carried it before I did and had the good sense to hand it to a younger fool.
I want to defend every choice from Zune’s death to the Coalition compact, every retaliation I refused and every compromise I swallowed.
I want to build a wall of reasons tall enough to hide the truth.
Instead I see Tomas covering his ears.
I see the yellow door at Rekk’s schoolroom.
I see Zune’s face just before I killed him.
I see Ursa’s green eyes when she told me I might have been manipulated into becoming the spark.
My voice leaves me quieter than I intend. “I made mistakes.”
Skahar says nothing.
I continue because the first truth has broken the door, and the rest come through whether I welcome them or not.
“I thought fear would buy us space. I thought hurting the Combine enough would make them bargain honestly or keep their distance. I thought if the galaxy saw what happened when it came for Reapers, it would finally leave us something untouched.”
Krell looks up , then quickly looks down again.
Vakka stops speaking for half a breath before resuming her orders.
Skahar’s expression remains hard, but his grip on the cane loosens.
“I killed Zune because he threatened Ursa and because he wore every old wound in a face I could reach,” I say. “He deserved death. That does not mean my hand served my people when I gave it to him.”
The words hurt.
Good.
Some pains deserve to be felt.
Skahar’s voice lowers. “What do you know now?”
“I know enemies can spend my rage more easily than they can spend my restraint.”
His eye narrows slightly.
I look toward the tactical display, where red threat markers continue to pulse around Guyver Station like predators circling a wounded animal.
“I know the Combine wants me to lash out. The Alliance wants proof I cannot be contained. The Coalition wants my need to become permission. My captains want blood because blood feels like action. My civilians want to live. Those wants do not weigh the same.”
“No,” Skahar says. “They do not.”
Another impact rocks the station, smaller this time but close enough to send sparks raining from a damaged overhead conduit. No one screams in the command center. We are past screaming. We have entered the place where fear becomes labor.
Krell’s voice breaks in. “Boarding pod contained. Six hostile casualties, two prisoners, no civilian deaths in storage. Our warriors lost one.”
“Name?”
“Drokka of the Bone Wake.”
“Add him to the roll.”
“Yes, lord.”
The roll.
The list that grows faster than honor can justify.
Theryki’s channel opens again. “Lord Gnash, Coalition frigate Dawn Accord reports hostile retreat vectors through the northern debris field. They can pursue if granted expanded authority.”
Vakka looks at me.
Skahar looks at me.
Everyone waits again.
The old answer rises in me first.
Pursue. Kill. Burn the cowards from the dark. Make the Combine pay in the language it taught me.
Then I imagine the frigate chasing ghosts beyond the shield envelope while another attack strikes the market ring.
I imagine hostile ships drawing my allies and my fighters away from the people in shelters.
I imagine the enemy laughing because revenge remains predictable even when it wears strategy’s coat.
“No pursuit,” I say.
Theryki’s silence carries disbelief.