Chapter 24 #2
She threw herself at Horos, slammed him sideways, and rose as he gasped for air. She planted her boot on his throat, pressing down just enough to crush his windpipe and keep him from producing anything more than a broken wheeze.
No scream. No song.
Meanwhile Khar’s brothers reached the smuggler boss. Khar lunged after Tztz, but the cockroach beat him to the sphere.
It slapped a crude-looking beacon that had clearly been attached after the fact. The device emitted a mechanical whine and crackle. The creature immediately turned and sprinted away from the orb.
It did not get far.
The sphere opened like a flower calyx. Its interior reshaped in a blink, unfolding into a towering figure of white-and-gold titan metal, at least twice as tall as Khar.
Lily stared.
The machine looked as if someone had taken the best traits of every humanoid species and fused them into a perfect artificial hybrid. Its base color was platinum-white, threaded with gold lines that traced flawless functional geometry down its body.
Then it opened its eyes, and Lily’s breath caught.
One iris was gold, continuing the pattern in its body, the pupil elongated like a serpent’s, equal parts exquisite and instinctively threatening.
The other eye was ruined. A burned-out hollow, an old wound that somehow made the machine even more dreadful.
The shouting of Khar’s brothers yanked Lily out of her trance.
“You idiot!” one of them roared. “You unleashed a Colossus on us?”
The smuggler boss laughed. There was no joy in it. Some kind of fluid leaked from the corner of his mouth, and he did not even bother wiping it away.
“My entire crew is dead. At least now you’ll die too.”
The Divani brothers exchanged a look. Lily felt something shift in the air, heavy and immediate.
Until now, no matter what happened, she had felt a thread of hope. Thin, but present. The belief that she could still do something, that there was still a way through.
Now, watching Khar and his brothers, she understood at once.
This was not an enemy they all walked away from.
Khar moved first. He shoved his gold-horned brother hard in the back.
“Aros. Take Lily and go. I’ll hold it.”
The brothers traded another look, thick with meaning. They accepted the order.
The silver-horned brother headed toward the hangar exit. Aros, the one with gold guards, went straight for Lily.
The Colossus moved.
In one casual motion it hunted the cockroach creature down and crushed it into pulp.
Then it paused and turned slowly, scanning the hangar as if calculating which of them posed the greatest threat.
Lily felt, in her bones, that against the force this walking weapon represented, they had no chance.
Aros reached her with speed that did not match his size. Before Lily could say a word, he leaned down to Horos, shifted her foot aside, and snapped Horos’s neck with a sickening crack.
Lily flinched.
Aros did not give her time for even a sound. He seized her wrist and ran, dragging her from cover to cover, forcing her to stay low as he drove them toward the hangar exit and the smugglers’ ship.
Lily tried to look back, tried to understand what was happening with Khar and the Colossus, but Aros refused to let her stop.
The sounds behind them made it clear that everything before had been child’s play.
Near the exit there was no more cover. They would have to sprint the last stretch.
Aros peeked over a crate.
This time Lily refused to let him block her view. She lifted her head too.
The hangar was in ruins. The Colossus had smashed anything in its path. The smuggler boss, who had shrugged off every attack before, now lay in two pieces on opposite sides of the deck.
Horos’s body was still mostly intact, though fallen crates had pinned his legs beneath them, likely pulverizing the bones.
Khar was moving, fast and precise, leaping over debris, drawing the Colossus away from the exit.
When he hit the far wall, Lily’s chest clenched.
A dead end.
Then Khar began to climb.
Catlike, his claws found every seam, every grip, every ledge as he angled toward the antigrav crane overhead.
Lily’s mind flashed with hope. Maybe they could trap the Colossus with it. Maybe.
“Aros,” she gasped. “We have to help him. He’s almost at the crane.”
She started to move, but Aros caught her by the collar and yanked her back. Lily hit the deck with a painful grunt, but she was at least in cover again.
“Lily, we can’t.” His voice cut like steel. “A Colossus is not a toy. It was the greatest trump card in the Ancient Artificial Intelligence Uprisings. I don’t know how it got here, but it can destroy armies on its own. The crane won’t stop it. Khar’s sacrifice cannot be wasted. We have to go.”
Lily’s blood hammered in her ears. Her hands clenched into fists.
Her world narrowed to one thing.
Khar.
Maybe she had made poor choices. Maybe she had been timid and weak and ashamed. None of it mattered now.
Khar mattered.
And Khar would not be without her.
“Then go,” she said. “I’m staying.”
She sprang up and burst from cover in a tiger-smooth roll.
The Colossus stood beneath Khar’s climbing form, terrifyingly still, as if to say resistance was beneath it.
Khar reached the crane, but he had no chance if the Colossus turned its focus back to him.
Lily would not let that happen.
She snatched up one of the abandoned smuggler daggers and hurled it at the Colossus’s back.
She knew it would not damage it. That was not the point.
She only needed its attention. Just long enough for Khar to engage the crane’s magnet systems.
The Colossus turned.
Its single serpent-pupiled eye fixed on Lily.
She went rigid.
Then, slowly, she began to step backward.
Even that pathetic motion took everything she had, as if the machine’s stare alone reduced her to trembling prey.
Above, the crane’s machinery roared to life.
Khar clung to the magnetic clamp and threw himself at the Colossus.
The jump was perfect.
The clamp swung in a clean arc toward the Colossus’s neck. The machine, for one impossible second, seemed entirely focused on Lily.
Lily stopped moving. She did not dare provoke even a flicker of motion.
Time slowed.
The clamp’s swing. Khar’s fall. The Colossus’s ominous stillness.
One eternal instant that carried their hope of survival and, with one wrong breath, the promise of both their deaths.
Then the clamp struck home.
The magnetic lock engaged automatically, drawing on Vitro’s full antigrav lifting capacity. Lily had once watched this very crane tow another cruiser into a service bay without the smallest strain.
The Colossus might be unstoppable in combat, but it was still metal.
Metal could be moved.
Khar hit the deck beside it and rolled away with trained precision.
Static filled the air as Vitro fought the load.
The Colossus did not budge.
It did not even look away from Lily.
It lifted one arm and crushed the clamp into powder, shorting the lift system in one simple squeeze.
Then it turned, kicked Khar hard enough to slam him to the floor, and dropped a knee onto him.
Lily screamed.
Aros caught her from behind, trying to drag her out, but Lily saw only Khar.
Khar tried to batter the Colossus away, but his blows bounced off it as if he were striking a wall.
The obsidian giant lay helpless beneath the white-and-gold executioner.
“No,” Lily choked. “Please.”
She knew her begging meant nothing. She did not care.
She had never asked Horos for anything. She would give the Colossus her entire life if it would spare Khar.
Aros hooked her legs out from under her and began to drag her toward the gate, farther and farther from the center of her world. Lily did not look away even once.
As Khar’s resistance slowed, as his motions turned heavy and painful, he searched for her with his glowing, demonic eyes.
When their gazes locked, Khar’s luminous eyes cut through the chaos like a path to Heaven, one she would never walk again. She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move. Only watch as her world collapsed in a single moment.
“Go, my queen,” she heard, as clear as if Khar stood beside her, not an insurmountable distance away.
The Colossus drew back its arm.
Prepared the final strike.
A blow that would shatter the center of Lily’s world and, with it, every reason she had left to survive.