“If any life remains in you we will breathe it back to fullness. We cannot offer aid in fighting, but in healing you have our pledge.”

  “You’ve helped a lot already,” Drake said.

  “They have?” Kaustikos said. “Listen, it seemed like, when we lost time, that we might have been in some kind of a stasis field–”

  “Farewell family and friends of family.” Metal waved a pseudopod and then sank through the floor and out of sight.

  “Let’s get on board,” Janice said. “Then we’ll fill you in on the secrets of the galaxy, how about that?”

  “Callie must be looking for us.” Elena stood in the observation port, looking at the stars. Janice had been trying to reach Callie, without success. She’d succeeded in contacting the resistance, and they’d had plenty of news to share, but all they knew about Callie was that she’d taken off in the Blaze without saying where she was going.

  “I’m sure she is,” Shall said. “Where do you think she’s doing the looking?”

  “She’ll assume we were taken by Shaper,” Elena said. “So she’d try to figure out where he is. Since he wasn’t in the surgical headquarters, where would she go next?”

  Lantern spoke up on the comm. “If Shaper is in retreat, he would go to protect the Axiom he has in stasis, probably. There’s a location marked on our map that doesn’t correspond to any of the facilities used by the Exalted. Maybe it’s the secret heart of everything in this system. Callie has the map – she may have drawn the same conclusion.”

  “Running alone toward danger?” Elena said. “Sounds right.”

  “Just give the order, captain,” Shall said.

  Elena flinched. “What?”

  “You’re the executive officer,” Shall said. “Ranking officer on the ship while Callie’s gone. We go where you tell us.”

  Elena swallowed. “Right. I knew that. Ashok, can you open a bridge near the coordinates Lantern has for this secret station?”

  “You got it, acting cap.”

  Elena went up to the cockpit. Janice and Drake were standing on their new legs, operating consoles with their new arms – they had two on each side now, with extra thumbs, and the prosthetics seemed to work just as well as their biological ones – and those worked better than they had before. “Captain on deck!” Janice shouted.

  Elena winced. “You don’t say that for Callie.”

  “She’s not too concerned about ceremony, as long as we respond to orders promptly when it counts,” Drake said.

  “But we don’t know about your command style, Captain Oh. For all we know you’ll throw us in the brig if we don’t salute.” She saluted, with all four arms.

  “Ugh, come on, we aren’t even a military vessel.”

  “We know that, but how do we know whether or not you know that?” Janice said.

  “I didn’t expect to get less respect when I ascended to a position of ultimate power.” Elena strapped herself into Callie’s chair, as weird as that felt.

  “We respect you plenty. What you’re experiencing now is actually affection.” Drake turned their head and grinned at her.

  “Ready on your command, oh exalted empress of the stars,” Ashok said over the comms.

  “Make a hole,” Elena said.

  The bridgehead opened before them, and the White Raven passed through.

  “You’re brooding,” Shall said.

  “My crew got kidnapped right out from under me,” Callie said. “I’m not brooding, I’m furious. Also worried, but I’m focusing on the furious to keep the worried under control. How much farther?”

  “A few hours. Why don’t you get some sleep?”

  “Who needs sleep when I have military-grade stimulants?” She’d explored the Blaze during this abominably long journey and found its impressive armory and its equally impressive infirmary. There were drugs here that would let you operate at peak physical and mental performance for days on end… at the expense of a terrible crash later. Callie, who was not terribly concerned about ‘later’ right now, had helped herself to some of the best vials available. “Do you think the Jovian Imperative will let me keep this ship? It’s salvage, more or less, right?”

  “You want to give up the White Raven?”

  “Not at all. We’d use this ship for more dangerous missions, because I’d be less sad if the Blaze got blown up.” She paced around the command deck, unable to relax, both chemically and psychologically.

  “Callie, long-range sensors just picked up the opening of a wormhole nearby.”

  “Is it a scourge-ship?” The bridge generators on the vehicles in the shipyard had been limited in their choice of destinations, but Shaper could doubtless turn off those governors and go wherever he wanted.

  “I can’t tell what it is yet – I can pick up the change in the fabric of space-time well before I can tell what emerged from it. I’m retasking sensors. Let me see what I can see… Callie. It’s the White Raven.”

  She gripped the back of the captain’s chair so hard it made her knuckles ache. “Hail them!”

  “This is the Blaze. Please identify.”

  After a brief delay, Shall’s voice said, “Hello, Blaze. This is the White Raven. We’re all okay here, but we’ve got a lot to tell you…”

  Callie let out a long, rattling breath. “Elena? Are you there?”

  “That’s Captain Elena to you,” she said, and Callie let out a sound that was halfway between laughter and a sob.

  The White Raven held position while the Blaze burned in its direction, and Callie used her short-term teleporter to jump to the former as soon as it came within range.

  Elena was waiting for her, and they embraced, separated long enough for Callie to yank her helmet off, and then grabbed onto one another again. “I thought I lost you,” Callie said. “I was so scared.”

  “I didn’t spend as much time being scared, because the nice aliens put us in stasis for a bit while they talked to Drake and Janice, but I was worried, too. I’m glad you’re here. Your crew is really insubordinate. Have you ever noticed that?”

  “My XO has been known to take all kinds of liberties. I’m sure you were great.” Callie took a deep breath and stepped back. “Okay. We should have a family meeting. My previous plan to attack the secret station and punch Shaper in the head until he told me where you were should be modified to reflect current reality.”

  “It seems pretty straightforward,” Callie said. “Things have gone to hell in this system for the Exalted – the Jovian Imperative is coming, if they aren’t here already – so Shaper is probably planning to flee, and to take his frozen Axiom with him. We need to get there first and kill the Cleansing Corps.”

  “And steal their stuff,” Kaustikos said.

  “And blow up their stuff. I’d rather not give the Imperative any more Axiom toys, especially ones that belong to the faction dedicated to exterminating life and exploding actual planets and unleashing customized plagues. I don’t trust anybody with that kind of technology. The Imperative is already going to get ahold of a scourge-ship or two, and they’ll throw every engineer they’ve got at figuring out how the bridge generators work. I can’t stop them from visiting faraway places, but maybe I can stop them from destroying those places utterly when they get there.”

  “The situation might not be that bad,” Ashok said. “I’ve been trying to figure out how the bridge generators work for ages, and it’s still just a magic black box as far as I can tell. I think there’s stuff going on inside that violates all the known laws of physics. I’m starting to think there are whole stars or even universes bottled up in those greasy black cubes. We’re like cave-people trying to figure out how a Tanzer drive works.”

  “Put a couple thousand highly trained cave people on the problem and they’ll probably crack it eventually,” Callie said.

  “The stasis field, though – the healers said that has medical uses,” Kaustikos said. “Surely we should keep that technology. Think of how lucrative licensing it could be.”

  “A field that stops time for anything inside it?” Callie said. “That can keep time stopped for thousands of years, maybe longer? That sounds like a tool for domination and control to me. No. Let’s make it all go boom.”

  “Should we just bombard the station as soon as we’re within range?” Shall said.

  Callie shook her head. “There could be humans there. Who know what Shaper is up to out here. We also need to make sure Shaper is on board, because, if they’re not, we have to go after them, wherever they are. I took out two of the three heads of this nightmare system. It will make my teeth itch forever if one of them gets away. We’ll approach with the White Raven in stealth – the Blaze is more about striking fear than being sneaky, so it can hang back until we need its guns. I’ll take an infiltration team, see what we’re dealing with, and then I’ll give the order to tear the station up once we know. I’ll go, and Shall can come in his war drone, and Ashok in case there’s engineering stuff, and Lantern in case there’s Liar stuff, and Kaustikos.”

  “In case you need my brilliant tactical insight?”

  “No, but we still have you rigged with a bomb, so, if necessary, we can make you explode as a distraction.”

  “Callie, the station is in sensor range, and… you’d better come look at this thing.” Janice sounded more troubled than snarky for once, and Callie hurried up to the cockpit from the galley. She was briefly surprised by seeing Janice and Drake standing at their station on shiny new prosthetics, because she was so used to them operating from within their mobility device, but it was a good kind of surprised. The chair had been good for them, allowing them relative relief from pain and some freedom of movement, but the healers had improved on both those areas. They even said they’d spend more time on Glauketas with the rest of the crew now that gravity didn’t trouble them so much, and Callie was happy at the prospect of seeing more of them.

  “Show me,” Callie said.

  The windows turned into screens, filled with a magnified view of the thirteenth station.

  “What the hell am I looking at?” Callie said.

  CHAPTER 28

  “It’s biomechanical, we think,” Janice said. “It probably started out as one of the Axiom facilities we’ve seen before, a big nasty branching thing, like the inside of an anthill cast in metal. You can see that basic shape, underneath all the… stuff growing on it.”

  The thirteenth station was covered entirely in flesh, and, in some places, that flesh was more than a mere covering, and bulged out in immense, tumorous growths. The growths weren’t uniform, either, but wildly variegated in color and texture – some sections resembled the slick flesh of a snail, and others the pebbled skin of a starfish, and there were sections of snot yellow and bile green and arterial red. Some sections seemed to pulse. “Is that thing breathing?” Callie said.

  “Parts of it are definitely moving,” Janice said. “I think it’s… well, alive, captain.”

  “If it’s alive, what does it eat?” Callie said, imagining the Exalted feeding captive humans to some hidden maw.

  “I think it feeds on radiation,” Shall said. “There was a definite physical reaction to some of our scanners, in the form of increased… I don’t want to say ‘blood flow’, but some kind of subcutaneous fluid reaction. If I had to guess, I’d say it metabolizes radiation – galactic cosmic rays, solar wind, maybe other forms produced within the station itself.”

  “Why would you make something like that?” Janice often sounded disgusted, but she sounded especially disgusted now.

  “That is a harder question,” Shall said. “The Exalted do seem to enjoy their biological experiments, though.”

  “Forget why they made it,” Callie said. “How are we supposed to board it?”

  Janice said, “There seem to be airlocks, here and here.” Portions of the screen lit up, and revealed gleaming metal rectangles poking through the flesh, like pieces of shrapnel sticking out of a body. “But if you were planning to take Shall’s war drone or Lantern’s blister-ship and cut your way through the hull for a sneaky entry… you can try it, I guess, but that skin is thick, and I don’t want to think about what would come spurting out if you tried to cut into it. Blood or pus or acid or–”

  “I get it,” Callie said. “I’ll have to do a short-range teleport and open one of the airlocks from inside. I hate coming in the front door. Or any door.”

  “The Vanir system does seem to demand a lot of solo infiltration from you,” Shall said. “Fortunately, we do still have the element of surprise. The resistance doesn’t know about this station, and Shaper doesn’t know we have a map of Axiom and truth-teller facilities, so he may not even be watching the entry ways.”

  “You only know about this station thanks to the largesse of the Benefactor,” Kaustikos chimed in. “Lest you forget the reason you’re here.”

  “I have an excellent memory,” Callie said. “Do we have any sense of what’s going on in there?”

  “Axiom stations are resistant to scanning,” Janice said. “I’m getting weird readings externally, because of all that flesh – it’s warm, alive, and radioactive, or some combination of the three, depending on where I point my instruments. The interior is a mystery, though.”

  “And everyone knows I like mysteries. I’m going to suit up. Shall, figure out the coordinates for my teleport, would you?” She looked at the biological horror drifting in the void before her for another moment – would this be like entering a space station, or spelunking inside a leviathan? – and then turned away.

  Callie emerged from her personal wormhole just inside the nearest airlock. The Axiom stations she’d visited before were vast, and this one was no exception – fortunately, the biological weirdness seemed limited to the exterior. The inside was all dark metal and struts, without meat or goo.

  A single scourge-ship was parked in the immense hangar, and, despite its size, it looked like a breadcrumb forgotten on an otherwise empty table. At least now she knew she wasn’t alone. Someone was here. Probably Shaper.

  Callie needed to make sure that scourge-ship was unoccupied before she opened the airlock, and she approached it under active camouflage. The ship’s airlock opened for her, and she boarded and made her way to the cockpit. No pilot on board. She checked the ship’s systems and confirmed the presence of half a dozen hunter-drones on board, and after loading Shall’s control software, she put them all into diagnostic and repair mode. That was much easier than hunting them down and shooting them on an individual basis.

  Callie left the ship and trudged to the hangar’s main airlock. The controls were just like those on the first Axiom station they’d discovered, so she knew how to make it open. She didn’t like thinking about how many aspects of Axiom technology had become familiar to her.

  Opening the airlock would probably set off alarms all over the station, but she didn’t mind. This place was enormous. Much better to draw Shaper to her than to spend time looking for him.

  She punched in the opening sequence and watched Shall’s war-drone fly over with Ashok clinging to his back, followed by Lantern in her blister-ship and Kaustikos floating alone. By the time the hangar doors were halfway open, her boarding team sailed through the gap and landed. Callie shut the hangar door and gathered her troops. “Ashok, go disable that scourge-ship. I don’t want anybody slipping away when we aren’t looking.”

  “Permanent disabled or temporary disabled?”

  “We’ve got two ships outside, so I don’t foresee us needing this one. Break it like you mean it, but in a non-exploding way. We might need this hangar later.”

  Ashok snapped off a lazy salute and went humming toward his task.

  “Lantern, you and Shall see if you can find any kind of station map, internal life support sensors, things like that. Kaustikos and I will just pick a passage and start searching for Shaper. If you find anything useful, let us know.”

  Lantern and Shall went in search of a terminal they could access, and Kaustikos floated at Callie’s shoulder as she moved toward the nearest access door that led deeper into the facility. They explored empty corridors and rooms full of undisturbed dust in silence for a long time, Kaustikos scouting ahead and returning with news of nothing. Callie periodically checked in with Lantern and Shall, who hadn’t found anything as useful as a map, or an explanation of why the station was covered in flesh. “Any useful sensor data?” Callie asked.

  “The only life signs we see on board are yours, mine, and Ashok’s,” Lantern said. “But Shaper could be masking his somehow.”

  “So in the meantime we search for a particular grain of sand in a mansion. We’ll keep trudging.”

  Kaustikos returned from another abortive scouting attempt and drifted along beside her. “I was surprised you chose me to accompany you. I had the sense you didn’t like me.”

  “I just don’t like bullshit, and that’s what all your internal components are made of. The Benefactor knew what we were going to find in this system – he even knew the healers who worked on Drake and Janice years ago were here. How? Is he a Liar? A rogue elder from the sect of the truth-tellers?”

  “I’ve only communicated with the Benefactor remotely, captain. He gave me information he deemed necessary to help you with your mission, to destroy the Axiom here, but he hasn’t shared the origin of that information with me.”

  “Kaustikos, you’ve provided basically zero information. If you hadn’t acted as distraction once or twice I’d say your presence here has been totally pointless.”

  “You wound me, captain. I would have shared more intelligence with you, but you and your crew have proven adept at discovering things on your own, and anyway, your basic distrust of everything I say makes any attempts to help you counterproductive.”

  Callie grunted. “Can you tell me one thing that’s useful, Kaustikos? Just one? Any tidbit that could actually be construed as remotely helpful?”

  The probe was silent for a moment. “Just that Shaper is the smartest and most ruthless of those who ruled this system. You should be careful when you face him.”