Chapter 37
- Krix'vorr -
I turn the Beast sharply, and she surges away from the Nest so fast that half the crew is thrown off their feet.
I don't slow her, and I don't apologize for it.
Behind me, in the command chamber, nobody has said anything for a long time.
Sris clings to a strut near the ceiling, her small body trembling, and when she finally speaks her voice comes out high and uncertain, nothing at all like the confident, delighted creature who patted my arm an hour ago. "Chief Harrower! You turned away from the Nest!"
"Well observed, Sris." I look over my shoulder. Only the Inquisitor has the authority to stop this, and if he tries, I have to fight him.
"You were nearly docked." She scuttles closer, agitated in a way I've never seen from her. "The Queen is expecting you. The new Queen, the Royal Mate, all of it! Chief Harrower, do you understand what you're–"
I accelerate as hard as the Beast can take, and I sense that she loves being given the chance to use her power. "I understand exactly what I'm doing, Sris."
She extends all her limbs, every leg and claw. "But why—"
"Because it's Nora," I say, and something in the flatness of my own voice ends the conversation more thoroughly than any order could have.
Sris stares at me for a long moment, uncomprehending, and then retreats to her strut and says nothing further.
I don't think she will ever understand it.
I'm not sure I could explain it to her even if I tried.
It's just something I know with every part of me.
And this, turning around on the brink of absolute triumph, is such a relief that I nearly gasp for air.
Inquisitor Brax'tok says nothing at all.
He stands near the rear of the chamber, very still, watching the readouts as the Nest grows smaller ahead of us, and there's something in his stillness that I don't have the time or the will to examine right now.
Whatever calculation is happening behind that composed face, it isn't my concern. Not today.
But he's clearly not opposed to this move, this break. For it is a break, and we all know it. I'm placing Nora above my own Queen, my own Brood, my own purpose, everything I thought I was.
And it feels right.
Two days through the Soft Dark. I spend every hour of them in the command chamber, not eating, barely sleeping, leaving the controls only when the Beast forces me off by dimming the lights until I can't see.
Even then I don't go to the cabin. I can't. The emptiness in there would stop me, and I can't afford to stop.
I can't risk anyone interfering with this. The Inquisitor may well try to wrest the Beast from me, or have Deeg do it.
Or Sris may try some well-meaning sabotage of my actions.
But I don't think about them much. I think only about Nora and what may be happening to her.
I often reach up and caress the Beast. “Faster, if you can.”
She always can.
Finally the station grows in the main forward lens, vast and cold and unmistakably built, not grown.
Every line is hard-edged, purposeful, ugly in a way nothing living ever is.
Somewhere on its far side, small and dark against the station's hull, I see it: the calf, buried beak-first into the metal like a thorn that never came free.
She found her way in. She's still here, days later. That can't be good.
The Beast slows as we approach, and I feel her decide, without any order from me, to press herself against the station's flank close beside the calf, patient and enormous and tense in her own slow way.
"Chief Harrower." Brax'tok speaks for the first time since we left the Nest. "I should come with you."
"No," I say flatly.
"Deeg could clear a path—"
"No." I'm already moving toward the airlock, checking nothing, needing nothing but my own hands and whatever I find on the other side.
"This isn't a mission, Inquisitor. This isn't Brood business, and it isn't yours.
This is the opposite of the Queen's will.
Whatever happens over there happens to me, and only me.
I won't have it cost anyone else. Certainly not a possible future Royal Mate, which you plainly are. The danger is too great."
He studies me for a moment longer, and something changes behind his eyes that I don't have time to read. "As you say," he says finally, and steps back.
I don't wait for anything else.
The airlock membrane parts and I drop into the gap the calf has torn, into the station's cold, dead-smelling interior, and the moment my feet touch the alloy floor I feel it.
It's faint, easy to mistake for imagination, but unmistakable once I stop and let myself feel it properly: A prickling low in my carapace, a charge gathering somewhere, pulling gently, insistently, toward one direction and no other. She's here.
I follow it. The corridors are narrow, built for smaller frames than mine, and I don't slow down for that.
A drone unfolds from a maintenance alcove ahead of me, some low mechanical thing bristling with sensors.
It doesn't get the chance to finish whatever it means to do.
I take it apart with both hands and don't break stride.
The charge in my chest pulls left. I go left.
A pair of Gzet guards round a corner ahead of me, weapons already rising, some restraint field crackling to life around them that I feel close over my limbs like cold water. It slows me and drags at every motion.
But it isn't enough. Right now, nothing can stop me. I tear through it the way I'd tear through thin fabric and put both guards through the wall behind them before they can raise an alarm.
The charge pulls down, toward a lower level, and I find a stairwell and don't bother with the stairs at all. My wings deploy by themselves and I race down, falling more than flying.
What I see on the way down slows me more than any restraint field could.
There's a wide, echoing bay stacked floor to ceiling with cells no larger than cargo boxes, hundreds of them. Behind the fogged panels of the ones I pass close enough to see clearly, I spot shapes that flinch away from the light.
There's a corridor lined with transparent doors, restraints built into the walls themselves, waiting.
A room, glimpsed only for a heartbeat through a doorway that doesn't survive my passing through it.
It's full of tables and instruments laid out with the calm, patient precision of something done often, something routine.
I see several such rooms, each adding to my fury.
Something in me that has spent a lifetime believing the Brood's right to take whatever it wants goes very quiet, and something else, colder and older and entirely mine, wakes up in its place.
I have never in my life wanted so badly to absolutely destroy everything I see. I don't even want to Harvest this. I just want it gone.
Masses of guards and robots come at me, wielding weapons. I fight them, the anger making me feel invincible. Blades hack at my carapace and limbs, projectiles hit my wings, and my head takes a blow that makes me black out for a short moment. But still I go on, never slowing down.
The charge in my chest sharpens to something almost unbearable, close now, close enough that I don't need Lucius or luck or anything at all to tell me which wall to go through.
So I go through it.
The wall gives way in a shriek of tearing metal, dust and debris. The wailing of alarms fills the room beyond, and through the settling chaos I see it all at once: a table, a restrained shape, a robed Gzet figure already turning toward the breach with an instrument still raised in one clawed hand.
I don't notice crossing the room. I only notice the surgeon's instrument shattering against the far wall, and the wet, final sound of the Gzet beneath my hands ceasing to be a threat to anyone ever again, and then nothing at all in front of me except her.
Nora.
She's staring up at me from the table, restraints still closing around her wrists, her face streaked with dust and tears and something that might be disbelief, might be relief, might be both at once. Something in my chest that has no name in any language I know simply comes undone.
I tear the restraints apart with my bare hands and pull her up against me, and the moment her skin touches mine, lightning arcs between us. Just one hard bolt, with a loud crack, gone as fast as it comes, like something remembering where it belongs.
"You came," she says, and her voice breaks entirely on the second word.
I get her Kast flower out of a pouch and gently place it where it belongs, behind her ear. "I found that without you, I might own the galaxy, and still own nothing worth having."
For the first time since I left the Nest, I understand that it was never really a choice at all.