“No. We don’t have origin coordinates yet,” I shot back.

  “Murdock,” Brito warned over the comms while his ships reacted by trying to put more distance between each of them while still maintaining engagement in the fight.

  “I see it,” I whispered back, still dazed. “We’re on it. You just need to keep the other ships occupied.”

  “We’ll do our best,” he answered.

  I glanced at where Prestige had been a few seconds earlier, nauseous at the thought of all the lives that had just been lost, including Commander Volker. Rather than let the scene weaken me, I let anger course through me, using it as fuel to steady my hands.

  “Team Hondo,” I said through my comm badge. “Let’s get this son of a bitch. Matt, it’s time to rock and roll.” I started playing again. AC/DC this time. Hells Bells.

  Head Case swung hard left, energy blasts from nearby Niflin corvettes bouncing off Dryka’s reflect. Around us, Brito’s frigates launched a barrage of return fire. The squadron-like arrangement of the boxy ships was effective in ganging up on individual targets, tearing through shields and quickly downing overmatched enemy starships. Unfortunately, the tactic also kept the Nobukkian ships too close together, and when Dominator lashed out with a burst of red energy, four of the frigates went dark at once, their entire back ends seeming to disintegrate within seconds.

  “What the hell was that?” Matt growled over the comms in response to the sigils.

  “Nothing we want to be hit with,” I replied. “Dutch, fire on that sigilship.”

  “It’s running reflect,” she countered.

  “Not for much longer,” I said, hitting it with both dampen and separate simultaneously. Its defensive sigil fell apart beneath my attack, and Dryka followed through, burning the ship to slag.

  We shot past the wreckage. and Matt swung Head Case more in line with Dominator. The huge ship lashed out again with its apparent disintegration bolts. Three more of Brito’s frigates went down while another four quickly succumbed to the numerous other sigilships still in the fight.

  “We can’t hold out for long like this,” Brito said. “We’re being slaughtered.”

  I knew it, but what were we supposed to do? “You need to hold out,” I barked back, jaw clenching in fury. I spotted a Niflin corvette turning to take aim at one of the frigates and activated separate through the crown, ripping it in half before it could fire. The action sent a cold chill of anger through my body, and I shivered. I repeated the process on a second enemy ship as the battle raged around us.

  “Come on, Lyke,” I growled, tearing two more Niflin corvettes apart as though they were made of paper. “Pay attention to me.”

  The Royal Guard starfighters regrouped, some moving in waves against the corvettes. Others kept the enemy fighters engaged, maneuvering around the debris in a deadly game of cat and mouse, while Brito’s frigates picked up the ferocity of their attacks, peppering the enemy ships with energy blasts and torpedoes.

  Dominator remained the eight hundred pound gorilla focused on Brito’s fleet. Lyke seemed satisfied to ignore me for the moment while she cut down the Count’s traditional warships, her plan apparently to isolate us like a stranded diver surrounded by sharks.

  I glanced at Dryka, noticing how quickly she’d become sweaty and pale. She was giving her all to keep reflect stable around the ship, but the cracks were already beginning to show. Head Case shuddered as a torpedo found its way through and hit the traditional shields.

  “Murdock, we’re losing four of ours for every one of theirs,” Brito said. “We can’t survive this attrition for much longer, and I’m not losing my entire fleet today. If you’re going to do something, do it now.”

  “I’m trying,” I shouted back, immediately annoyed with myself for lashing out at him. “Damn it,” I hissed. “This isn’t working. There are too many of them.”

  “Ben, I have a question,” David said.

  “This isn’t the best time,” I replied.

  “I think it might be.”

  My head whipped in his direction. “What?” I snapped impatiently.

  “Why are you gimping yourself so much?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re pulling pure motes, man,” he replied. “You don’t need sigils. So why are you only using actions from your construct?”

  My eyes locked on David, and I froze so hard I almost stopped playing. The entire universe seemed to shift to slow motion. “We only measured the wavelengths of the sigils in my construct.”

  “Which we used as a baseline to build the algorithm. But the system is dynamic.”

  I stared at him with my mouth agape for what felt like eternity, but was probably less than a second. “Why didn’t you tell me that sooner?”

  “I thought you already knew it.”

  I shook my head in sardonic disbelief. “Son of a bitch. Matt, fly us between the sigilships.”

  “Between them? Are you crazy?” he replied.

  “Cap, I don’t think I can hold out much longer,” Dryka added. “You’re going to kill me.”

  “And burn out the reactors,” Meg said. “We’re using a lot of fuel to keep these sigils going.”

  “Just trust me,” I replied to all of them. “Let’s see Lyke keep ignoring me after this. Brito, pull your ships up and away from the corvettes. Now!”

  “What are you—”

  “Now!” I repeated, more forcefully this time.

  “On it,” he said, vanishing from our comms to pass orders to his captains.

  They began disengaging from the corvettes as Head Case rocketed between four of the sigilships. The enemy ships opened fire, probably realizing they could burn out our reactor if they kept the pressure on. Dryka reflected the assault, falling to her knees in the process. I picked up the pace of my playing, not even thinking about a specific sigil this time. Instead, I visualized what I wanted to see happen in my mind, hoping but unsure I could manifest it in reality without employing a corresponding sigil.

  The crown didn’t seem to care that I lacked faith. My body shivered as three rings of energy circled Head Case before flashing out in a series of expanding waves. The enemy had used the action earlier to devastating effect. I used it now, creating equal havoc.

  Two of the sigilships managed to get a shield up in time. One tried to absorb the energy and failed. The other attempted to reflect it, but with the waves continuing to roll in, the archon on board burned himself out trying to counter them. The ship’s defenses shattered, the waves ripping through the corvette and into the others, vaporizing all four, plus three more.

  I cringed when one of Brito’s ships clipped a wave, the bow’s forecastle shearing off under the friendly fire and leaving the ship dead in space. I was remorseful but not sorry. The result was well worth the small loss of life in that ship’s upper forward compartments. I just hoped they’d gotten them sealed off quickly.

  “Wow, that was awesome!” Meg shouted in response to the destruction. Dryka smiled too and stared at me in amazement, while David offered me two thumbs up. I wish I could have celebrated with them, but the expenditure of chaos energy had taken its toll.

  Dexterity fled my fingers, and my hands started shaking so hard I couldn’t continue playing. I slumped back against Ixy, eyes rolling back, vision blurring. I was cold. So damn cold. My fatigued muscles ceased moving.

  “Crap,” Meg snapped, rushing to my side.

  “Bensss,” Ixy said worriedly, gently rubbing my cheeks with her pedipalps.

  “Captain!” Meg looked at the heater. “I can try to make it hotter.”

  “I’m spent,” I said, glancing at David. “It’s not enough.”

  “Well, you’d better dig deep and find a little more,” Dryka said from the sigibellum. “Because Dominator is headed our way.”

  Dryka drew my attention to the starboard feed, where the huge sigilship had broken off its assault on Brito’s forces, finally realizing we were too much of a threat to let linger any longer. Dominator’s sigils glowed so brightly it was obvious Lyke wanted to finish us with one heavy punch. I wanted more than anything to negate her action, but my fingers refused to even twitch. Nevermind moving my hands. My muscles were locked in place.

  I’d underestimated the burn from my massive attack, and rather than gimping my tactics I had wound up gimping myself. I could have kicked myself for my recklessness, except I couldn’t move my legs.

  “Ben?” Dryka said, dragging herself back to her feet so she could activate the sigibellum again and give us some protection. “Come on. We need you.”

  Dominator was closing in a hurry. Head Case rattled as the shields absorbed hits from the surrounding corvettes pummeling us with energy blasts and torpedoes. We had destroyed nearly a dozen sigilships single-handedly, almost a quarter of Blorb’s fleet. We had put up a good fight. A great fight. It just wasn’t enough.

  “Ben?” Meg pleaded, wrapping one of my hands in hers. “You’re so cold.”

  “Ben, what’s going on up there?” Matt asked over the comms. “We’re getting hammered.”

  I closed my eyes. Not to give up. Not to fall asleep. To let go.

  Of my fear, my fury, and my fatigue. Of my life, as it was. I surrendered to a moment that seemed to last forever. I could hear the voices of my crew members become single deep notes, each syllable drawn out to infinity in the sudden lapse of time and space. The sound of a metronome overtook the voices, ticking away at a hundred beats per minute. A pinprick of light appeared in the darkness of my obscured vision. I gritted my teeth, mentally reaching out toward it. A great warmth seeped into my fingers, and I finally managed to move my hands. The warmth raced up my arms and spread throughout my body. The light expanded around me, bathing me. Cleansing me.

  My eyes opened. Head Case’s hull was vanishing before my eyes, the entire bulkhead in front of me already eaten away. The rest of the metal continued disintegrating around us. Blinding light, the energy of Dominator’s assault, enveloped the sphere of absorb around us. I knew instinctively that it wouldn’t hold for long.

  Because somehow, I was the one who had created it. Without music. Without my construct or the crown. Without any outward effort at all.

  Like before, it seemed my body was protecting itself by tapping into a power I couldn’t access on my own. But unlike before, I was awake through the whole thing, and I could feel, hear, and taste the chaos energy seeping through my pores. Through the cancerous, mutated cells that made me one-of-a-kind. Those cells would kill me soon enough. But for now, they were the only thing keeping us alive, even as Head Case fell apart around us.

  “David,” I said, getting his attention. He stood frozen in fear and shock, staring at his imminent demise the moment my body reached its limit and we lost the fight for good. His eyes drifted over to me, the universe still moving in slow motion. “You can use reverse now,” I continued matter-of-factly, surprised I even needed to tell him to undo our total destruction. I could only hope he would snap out of his panic long enough to activate his ring.

  He nodded, clasping his hands tightly together and closing his eyes. “Vicissim,” I heard him mutter, though every letter dragged out over seconds, like a lisp moving ever so slowly. The red glow of the ring pierced the spaces between his fingers, each vein of light spearing out one at a time in my slow motion reality.

  I watched in awe as the scene reversed. The blinding light was sucked away, Head Case’s hull reconstituting as the light disappeared. Dryka returned to the sigibellum, Meg backed away from me, Ixy’s grip reversing, her position and mine shifting as we were all dragged backward in time. The waves of consume contracted inward, the destroyed corvettes and sigilships returning to existence. My guitar slid back into my hands, the strength returning to my body. I straightened up in Ixy’s arms. The speed of existence returned to normal, leaving me where I had been twenty seconds earlier.

  “. We’re using a lot of fuel to keep these sigils going,” Meg finished saying before gaining a confused expression. “Whoa, that’s weird.”

  “Gia!” I shouted. “I need Dominator’s coordinates five seconds from now.” She should have been recording everything and sending it back to her mainframe, beyond the reach of David’s reversal. The coordinates appeared on my slab. “Here goes nothing. Matt, scale us down and fly straight!”

  I glanced at the nuke sled, ready for launch into the belly of the beast the moment I opened the portal. After what I had just experienced, there was no chance I was willing to fire and forget the real reason Blorb had come here. It wasn’t to surrender the moment he lost Dominator. He had come to either claim Atlas and the Hegemony or to destroy it completely.

  I looked out at space ahead of us, sending chaos energy into the crown and quickly opening a rift. After what I had just experienced, there was also no way I was going to leave Head Case and my crew behind. It was dangerous where we were going, but it was more dangerous out here. Besides, we would win or lose together.

  Scratch that. We would win together.

  “Ben, what the—” Matt managed to spit out before we hit the opening rift.

  Momentum carried us through.

  CHAPTER 43

  With the speed and size of a bullet, we blasted out of the rift, crossing open space in a flash before slamming into Dominator’s bulkhead. As we punched through the metal and the wiring behind it, Dryka’s reflect protected Head Case like a cape spread out in front of us. We barely avoided the thicker steel beams supporting the superstructure and broke through the next bulkhead into a storage room. We smashed through plastic bottles of cleaning solution and cans of furniture polish before blasting through the next bulkhead and into a corridor.

  We hit a crewman, his expression freezing in surprise just before Head Case pierced his eye and penetrated his brain, blowing out through the back of his skull. Matt managed to turn us before we hit the next bulkhead, friction and gravity slowing us as we flew along the length of the corridor. We passed two more crew members who didn’t notice us as they responded to the sudden collapse of their comrade.

  “That was so gross, but I can’t believe we made it,” Meg exclaimed.

  “Gia, where are we?” I asked. She had shown me schematics of a similar ship, but I had obviously missed the cargo hold, my timing and the coordinates slightly off target.

  “Go right at the next intersection,” she replied through Head Case’s speakers. Matt barely had time to make the turn, our velocity finally slowing as the high-speed turn worked to bleed off our velocity. Gia directed us to take the door at the end of the corridor.

  I pulled it open as we approached, revealing not the cargo hold, but a hangar still partially loaded with Niflin starfighters. I couldn’t help grinning as I pushed a group of them aside, piling them up and making space for Head Case to return to its full size.

  “Murdock, where the hell did you go?” Brito said. “You son of a bitch, I can’t believe you ran.”

  “I didn’t run, Brito. We’re inside Dominator, going after Lyke. Keep distracting the enemy as best you can. If we take this ship, the fight’s all but over.”

  “You’d better make it quick. We’re not going to last much longer out here.”

  “Copy that. Murdock out.” I stopped playing my guitar as Head Case scaled up to full size. Taking my slab from Ixy, I disconnected the external comms and switched to my badge. “This is it, Team Hondo. Zar, Emerald, George, Ki, Justus, Ixy, and Shaq—you’re with me. The rest of you, wait here and be ready to roll out on my orders. Leo, take over co-pilot duties for Justus.”

  I tapped the comm badge to disconnect and looked at the others on the deck. “David, do you think you can help Dutch with the sigibellum?” I glanced over at Dryka. She was obviously exhausted. I didn’t know how much more she had to give, and I knew she would never admit she was out of gas.

  “It’s the same as using a ring, right?” he asked.

  “Pretty much.”

  He nodded. “I’ve got this.”

  “Ixy, Shaq, let’s go.”

  I tried to stand on my own, failing the first time. Ixy caught me before I could hit the deck.

  “Needsss a ridesss?” she asked.

  “For now,” I replied. “Thanks, Ixy.”

  “Anytimesss.” She lowered herself so I could crawl onto her back.

  “Ben, why don’t you restore yourself?” David asked. “You don’t need the sigil anymore. You don’t need the construct at all.”

  I paused to consider it. “The cancer makes me stronger while it makes me weaker,” I replied. “I need all the strength I can get.”

  “Chaos energy strength won’t mean much if you can’t even stand up,” he said. “Besides, the crown gives you a major advantage. You’re already strong enough to deal with Admiral Lyke.”

  I would have spent longer thinking about it, but Brito and his fleet were out there, getting their asses handed to them. I played a short lick, instantly picking up on the chaos energy and thinking about my body getting stronger. Healing, but not too much. I had to keep a balance between physical, and for lack of a better word, magical strength. I could feel the construct etched into; my skin fading away, the scar tissue healing, my ability to channel chaos energy through it dissipating.

  A part of me feared becoming dependent on the crown. It wasn’t as much a part of me and could be stolen or broken. The same could be said of the guitar, and I was already just as dependent on it. Coil had almost killed me after ripping it out of my hands.

  The strength returned to my legs. A measure of warmth returned to my body. I wasn’t a hundred percent. Sixty-five, maybe. I could live with that.

  “Okay, now let’s go,” I said to Ixy and Shaq.

  We hurried to the elevator, riding it down to the hangar. I would have liked to stop at the armory for the scout armor, but there was no time. The rest of the away team had come to the same conclusion and had paused there only to grab guns and ammo. They were already in the hangar when I arrived, most of them still loading their guns, shoving extra ammo into their pockets, and either strapping on rifles or shoving backup handguns into their belts. For some reason, Emerald was in her pajamas. At least she’d gone with a fleece snowman print instead of something sheer. The bunny slippers were almost a bridge too far.