“Why was there still a scourge-ship on board then?” Callie kicked the side of the ship in question and glared at the war drone. “Why is there no evidence of a wormhole opening here recently?”

  “They must have had more than one ship. As for wormholes, those traces fade quickly. Or maybe they didn’t open a bridge at all, but just left under conventional power before we even got here. We lost him, Callie.”

  “I hate losing.”

  “It’s mostly a win,” Shall said. “We liberated the Vanir system! Sure, the Jovian Imperative will probably handle the cleanup, but, basically, we did it. Even more basically, you did it. Take a minute and bask in your victory.”

  “We came here to kill the Cleansing Corps, and we failed.” She sighed. “Maybe Shaper will hole up on one of the other stations marked on Lantern’s map. All right. Let’s pack up and go.” She looked around. “Where the hell is Kaustikos?”

  “Wandered off,” Shall said. “I’ll track him down.”

  Back on the ship, Elena tried to comfort her, along the same lines that Shall had – look at all the people they’d saved! Lantern did, too: “Shaper was not able to cure those Axiom, and they are terminally ill, so either they will remain in stasis, or die.”

  Callie didn’t feel any better. She’d been too slow. Also, she’d personally taken out two of the three heads of the Exalted, and the fact that the third had eluded her was an itch in her mind, like an unresolved chord.

  Elena came over and put her arm around Callie, snuggling close. She was a comfort, always, but it didn’t solve the underlying issue, did it? Callie was lucky to have love. She wanted to have a life where that love could thrive without quite so many existential threats.

  They gazed out the observation bay windows as the White Raven began to depart the station. The thirteenth station seemed uglier every time Callie looked at it, with those grotesque fleshy growths all over the structure, spanning across its modules and nodes –

  “Huh,” Elena said. She moved away from Callie, pressed her hands to the glass, and stared. “That’s… huh.”

  “What?” Callie said.

  “The station. I was trying to figure out why they bothered to cover it with that stuff. Why make it biomechanical at all?”

  “Aliens sometimes do things that are really alien,” Callie said.

  “Sure, but look… parts of the station are just thinly covered in strange flesh, right? Other parts are all bulbous. Some branches of the station are connected by vast swaths of tissue. Something like a tenth of the station’s mass is probably engineered flesh. I know we searched the whole station – but did we really search the whole station?”

  Callie looked at Elena for a moment. “Remind me to kiss you later.”

  “Since when do you need reminders?”

  Callie shouted into her comms. “Janice, scan the station again, but this time, focus on the biological parts!”

  “It’s not like we skipped those before,” Janice said. “They’re just unidentified organics. Parts of them are warm. It’s like a space station covered in tumors and growths.”

  “Scan the growths for density,” Elena chimed in. “Look for hollow places inside.”

  “Whatever you say, XO. The density of the growths isn’t uniform at all, you’re right. There are some really big air pockets here or bubbles or whatever you want to call them inside, here.” The windows changed into screens and zoomed in on a portion of the station that looked like pebbled starfish skin.

  Callie cracked her knuckles. “Shall, get your war drone ready. We’re going to do some exploratory surgery.”

  “Eww,” Shall said.

  CHAPTER 30

  Callie suited up, strapped herself onto Shall’s war drone, and they launched toward the station, aiming for a house-sized growth on one edge. Shall’s magnetic clamps were useless here, and he had to clamp onto the tumor with claws, digging into the meat of the station.

  Up close, the surface was even more horrific – there were cilia growing out of the dark green flesh, and the bumps were irregular and shiny with some sort of oil. “This thing looks like if a pickle had warts,” Ashok said in her comm. Callie’s suit cam and Shall’s sensors were streaming data back to the ship, and she imagined the crew gathered like sports fans watching a big game.

  “Cut me a door,” Callie said.

  Shall extended a manipulator that Ashok had hurriedly fitted with wickedly sharp blades, and it spun, dipping into the meat of the station. Gouts of greenish slime poured out, the fluid boiling and then freezing when it hit vacuum, fouling and binding Shall’s blade. That was fine – they’d just needed to get past the thick outer layer, which scans indicated was as solid as a spaceship hull. Shall packed the hole with explosives, then flew them to a safe distance.

  The silent detonation flashed light and flung meat. They returned to the now much bigger wound and squeezed inside. The living, organic mass of the interior rubbed against Callie’s suit, and, even with that fabric between her, the sensation made her gag. The interior of the tumor was dark, and doubtless damp and foul-smelling, but at least she was spared the latter aspects of the experience. She still felt like they were crawling around in the rotting corpse of a whale, though.

  “We’ve got some kind of tough membrane here, Callie.” Shall poked the translucent wall of tissue with a pointed arm. The membrane was pale green and stretched like a rubber sheet, and there was light on the other side.

  “Dig in really good, then pierce it.”

  Shall set his spiked feet in the flesh around them, then tore through the membrane. As Callie had expected, a brutal wind buffeted them as the atmosphere inside exploded out into the vacuum behind them. When the decompression-storm abated, Shall clawed his way inside the first of the hollows.

  They were in a round, fibrous chamber, the walls striated like muscle and glowing with green bioluminescence. There were more membrane-covered passages leading off in various directions. The biological equivalent of airlocks? How did they open? “Keep heading toward the big chamber Janice detected,” Callie said.

  “The membrane we came through… it just healed.”

  Callie looked behind her and saw the torn flesh had somehow knit itself together. She grunted. “It’s a self-healing space station. That would seem wonderful if the whole thing wasn’t so disgusting.”

  “The air pressure in here is equalizing, too. See those glistening slits on the ceiling?”

  She looked up, at long, narrow openings like gills above her, the edges fluttering as air passed through them. “I did not need to see that. Nor do I ever need to hear the phrase ‘glistening slits’ ever again.”

  Shall tore another membrane open and bulled down the narrow corridor, scraping the sides of the fleshy tube with his bulk, then shredded through a further membrane. The passageway wound around and down and deeper, doubling back on itself, and Callie imagined this as a journey through coils of intestines. The chamber they were looking for was kilometers deep inside this mass, but Shall moved fast. “It’s just ahead,” Callie. The largest membrane yet, big as a hangar door, bulged before them.

  “Let’s get in there.”

  Shall sliced his way through and charged in, and Callie said, “Yes.” She loved being right.

  This air pocket was as big as a hangar bay, and there were glass tubes here, too – shorter portable ones, only a few meters long, just big enough to hold their contents. It was hard to count the cylinders because they were so jumbled up, some standing upright, others leaning together, still others stacked up on their sides like lengths of pipe, but she estimated at least two hundred. Each tube held the body of a diseased Axiom, frozen in stasis. The Cleansing Corps, in all its foulness.

  “Shaper!” Callie broadcast through her suit’s external speakers. “Come out and face me!”

  “If it isn’t Captain Machedo. The worst diplomat in the galaxy.”

  The voice came through her comms. She muted that channel and said, “Janice, trace the source of that signal.” She switched back. “Shaper of Destiny. How’s that destiny working out for you?”

  “I have faith in my mission. I am pleased you’re here.”

  “I doubt that. There are too many Axiom piled up here to fit on a scourge-ship. What was the plan, exactly? Hide in this meat-sack and hope I’d go away? Do you have a bigger transport ship coming to meet you?”

  “A bigger ship? I have the biggest ship in this system, ready to depart. Admittedly, I was worried about using it, because I feared you would fire on my vessel… but now that you’re here, I’m safe. Your allies are unlikely to kill you, the hero of the revolution, just to get to me.”

  The station lurched, and a few of the Axiom cylinders fell over, clanking together. “What was that?” Callie said.

  A great rumble rose up through the floor and the walls, and the whole chamber jerked hard – if Callie hadn’t been strapped down, she would have gone tumbling.

  “Uh, Callie?” Janice said. “The big ugly tumor you’re inside just detached from the station somehow, tore itself free, unfurled some very starfish-looking arms and… Callie, that’s not a tumor. It’s a ship. It’s a ship made out of meat!”

  “Life is truly remarkable, isn’t it?” Shaper said. “My ship can heal her own damage, feeds on radiation from distant supernovae, produces food from her body sufficient to provision a crew far larger than she needs… she even has a rudimentary sense of self-preservation.”

  Before Callie could snap out a scathing reply, Shall interrupted her.

  “Callie. I’m stuck.” Shall tried to move his legs, but they just sank deeper into the organic floor. “The floor turned to slime and I sank, and then it thickened again, and now… I’ve got goo in my joints. I’m sinking, Callie.”

  “If this ship is alive, we can hurt it,” Callie said. “Fight back.”

  Shall began firing his weapons at the walls and the floor. Plenty of his shots struck the Axiom in their stasis tubes, but the projectiles and energy beams didn’t do any damage – the stasis fields were so powerful they prevented all harm.

  “My ship doesn’t feel pain, Captain Machedo. That would be cruel. She senses and repairs damage, but there’s no attendant suffering. Firing energy weapons at her is the equivalent of hand-feeding her, anyway. My masters dabbled with creating biological vehicles, but I’ve surpassed them with my ship. I call her the Scourging of the Skies.”

  Callie had seen Axiom biological vehicles. She’d even ridden inside one – a train-car-sized insect they’d controlled by manipulating its neural tissue with flashes of light. “So you made a space-faring starfish, huh? How does it propel itself? Some kind of shit-based excrement engine?” She didn’t care, but she could tell Shaper liked talking, and talking meant time.

  “Oh, various ways. She has membranes that act as solar sails. She can, indeed, expel gas from assorted orifices to aid in maneuvering. There’s a more conventional engine, too, grafted into her flesh. The internal atmosphere is created by chemical processes, and there are chambers full of edible plants and flesh, even a pool where I can take my leisure. My ship is a self-sustaining system, a true marvel of biological engineering. I may have failed to cure my masters, at least so far, but I did learn a lot of useful things in my researches.”

  “I don’t think any of this is very interesting, actually,” Callie said. “I’m getting bored. I think I’ll disable the stasis fields and start ripping the heads off your sick Axiom now.”

  “Please. The controls for the stasis field are up here with me. You could try to reach my command center, but I don’t think you’d make it far. This ship has an immune system, and you and your drone are foreign pathogens to be destroyed. That’s why the ship is absorbing your machine. You’re next. I only need you alive long enough to act as a hostage to secure my freedom.”

  “Callie, that meat-ship is opening a wormhole!” Janice shouted. “You have to get out of there!”

  “Plan B, Shall,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “I regret that I have but one… wait, five… no, I forgot about the Sunspot. I regret that I have but six lives to give for my galaxy.”

  While Shall was talking, Callie unstrapped herself from his back and leapt to a heap of Axiom cylinders. They shifted under her feet, but she kept her balance. She pointed herself toward the wall behind her, set her teleporter for max distance, and jumped.

  She didn’t emerge into space. They’d been too deep inside the ship, too far from the carapace, and she teleported somewhere into its flesh instead. Callie was pinned completely inside a tumor, her arms and legs immobilized by meat, her helmet’s view full of pulsing green slime. The flesh was malleable enough that teleporting into it hadn’t crushed her, the way appearing inside a concrete wall would have, but she was still stuck like a bug in molasses. She could maybe wiggle enough to trigger her teleporter again… but it needed almost four hours to recharge, and she didn’t have anywhere near that long left to live.

  What an irritating way to die. At least she had the satisfaction of knowing Shaper would die, too. It was amazing how hard she could hate someone that she’d never even seen in person. And she’d made the galaxy a little safer for Elena – no, don’t think about Elena, that hurt too much, think of anything else, it shouldn’t be much longer now.

  Then the meat around her exploded, and Callie went tumbling wildly into the open. She must have been stuck near the outer layer of the bio-ship, and Shall’s explosion had flung the meat that encased her out into space –

  But she wasn’t in space. There were no stars here, just the dark walls of a tunnel, lit intermittently by bars of light. She was inside the wormhole bridge, floating, watching the starfish ship come apart, great gobbets of meat flying in all directions and smashing into the walls of the tunnel. What would happen to her if the wormhole closed with her inside? It had happened, a few times, due to malfunction or mistake, and the ships in transit were just lost, never seen again. Would the tunnel collapse, and take her with it, or would she just float in empty tunnels until she died of thirst?

  A piece of the starfish ship the size of an elephant came flying at her, but it was going in the right direction…

  When the fleshy jetsam came near, Callie grabbed onto a trailing length of fibrous meat with both hands and kept holding on even when the speed of its motion jerked her arms so hard she cried out in pain.

  The meat was on an explosive trajectory toward the wormhole’s opening, and Callie could actually see the White Raven through the irregular portal, and the station, with a big ragged wound in its side where the starfish ship had ripped itself free.

  The journey through the wormhole only lasted twenty-one seconds. Her sense of time was scrambled, and she didn’t know how long ago the portal had opened or the Scourging of the Skies had entered, but she was terrified the tunnel would close with her inside it –

  The flying meat saved her. The propulsion in her suit wouldn’t have been enough to get her out before the wormhole closed, but hitching a ride on that piece of starship flesh gave her the velocity she needed to get clear. As soon as she returned to normal space, she released the meat, spun around, and watched the starfish ship burn inside the tunnel for an instant before the bridge closed.

  “Callie, are you all right?” Elena shouted

  “I am here and unharmed, XO,” she said. “We had to go with Plan B.”

  “I liked that war drone,” Shall said.

  “I still like it.” Callie laughed, hiccupped, and sobbed a little, all at once. “That drone saved my life and killed Shaper. Killed the Cleaning Corp, too, assuming that blast took out the stasis module.”

  “The self-destruct on those drones are designed to bust open reinforced bunkers and flatten hardened command centers,” Ashok said. “They’re full of boom and shrapnel and the shrapnel is loaded with secondary explosives, so it’s a bomb stuffed with a thousand other bombs. You set that kind of weapon off inside what’s basically a giant sea creature? You turned that ship into bouillabaisse, cap, along with everything inside it.”

  “Come pick me up,” Callie said. “I need to get this goo hosed off my suit.”

  “What do we do about the station?” Elena asked. She was in the galley with Callie and the rest of the crew. “The Jovian Imperative is coming, and they’ll find this station eventually – then they’ll have access to the stasis device, whatever horrible innovations they can extract from the biological tissue, and who knows what other technology.”

  Callie nodded. “We have to work with the Imperative. It’s inevitable, at this point. We need them. We have the list of Axiom sites we got from the Benefactor, but if we keep on this way, diving headfirst into the unknown, we’ll eventually hit our heads on a rock. The failsafe plan was always to let my ex-husband know about the Axiom in the event of our deaths, so he could use the resources of his corporation and the Imperative to continue the fight. I now concede there are advantages to getting them on board before we die.”

  “Like maybe we could even forego dying entirely?” Ashok said.

  “That’s one,” Callie agreed.

  “Allowing the Jovian Imperative access to Axiom technology could be very dangerous,” Lantern said. “The truth-tellers perform evil acts, but their ostensible mission was sound – if humans obtain wormhole technology, there’s nothing to stop them from going places they shouldn’t, where they risk waking the Axiom, or triggering automatic systems that could threaten all life. Nor is that the only concern. With Axiom technology, they could…” She trailed off.

  “Become like the Axiom?” Callie said. “Try to dominate the galaxy with their tech? Believe me, the thought of mind-control technology, or the nano-swarm from the Dream, or the kind of plagues the Exalted engineers invented, of any of that getting into the hands of some politician, terrifies me. But… the Axiom technology is out there, floating around, and somebody will pick it up eventually. It’s better if we’re involved, and can guide the ones who pick it up. At least we understand the magnitude of the Axiom threat.