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Sevro comes close. “That was rousing.”

“Too demokratic?” I whisper.

“I don’t think autocratic demokracy counts.” Sevro wrinkles his nose. “You did threaten to vent them into space.”

“Threaten? I thought I implied it rather smoothly.”

“Smooth as gravel, dipshit.” Sevro cackles a bit too enthusiastically and slaps his leg with his mech hand, denting the metal there. He winces, then looks up at me, slightly embarrassed. “Slag off.”

The door behind us begins to hiss. I turn to look at the glowing bulkhead. My enemies have brought a drill to assail me. My hands shake from the adrenaline. I feel the weight of dozens of blue eyes. The red of the door deepens, spreading. We haven’t long.

My razor ripples into killing form, long and terrible. “Company soon,” I say. I glance at Sevro, who has been distracted by one of the holo screens. I order the Blues to take shelter.

“They’re doing it,” Sevro murmurs. “Goryhell. Darrow, come look.”

He cycles through live visuals of Oranges and Blues ransacking the armories. Some Grays help them. Others stand by, unsure of their prerogative even as others shoot at the tide of their fellow shipmates. But no bullets can hold back this tide. They take weapons, run sloppily through halls, swelling their ranks. The roughest lead—not Blues, but Orange hangar workers and mechanics, along with Grays … one I recognize. The middle-aged corporal on my ship at the Academy, the one who escaped with us. He directs a score of men and women into the stateroom of a Gold. They subdue him respectfully. That peaceful accord is not far spread.

Three powerful squads of Golds, leading Obsidians and Grays, marshal in the life support rooms, at the engines five kilometers back to the aft of the ship, and just outside the bridge door. Those outside the bridge door number four Golds and six Obsidians. Ten Grays load weapons behind them.

“We’re still going to have company,” I say.

They’ll be coming through the door at any moment. Sparks spit from the inside of the bulkhead as their heat drill gets the better of the door. Metal drips inward, bubbling to the floor. The Blues shiver in terror, and Sevro and I square ourselves up and don our helmets, preparing for the new onslaught. Again the stench of my sick fills my nostrils. I tell the Blues to hide in the communications bay. They’ll be safe there.

A com light suddenly blinks on a console near me. Instinctively, I answer. A voice like thunder sends shivers through my bones. There is no visual.

“Can you hear me?”

“I can.” I glance over at Sevro. Whoever calls us is using a voice amplifier that sounds like the breaking of thunder. Sevro shrugs as if he hasn’t a clue who it is. “Who is this?”

“Are you a god?”

A god? An eerie quiet settles in me. That is no voice amplifier. I should have known by the cold, sluggish accent. I choose my words carefully, remembering my lore. “I am Darrow au Andromedus of the Sunborn.”

“You took the vessel and you are not yet Praetor? How?”

“I flew in through the bridge.”

“Alone from the Abyss?”

“With a companion.”

“I will come to meet you and your companion, godchild.”

The Blues look to each other in terror. They mouth something. Stained. The heaviness of fear settles on my shoulders. Sevro and I peer around the bridge, as though the beast were hiding somewhere in the shadows. More of the door peels away, dripping inward like some glowing red, rotting fruit.

Then one of the Blues gasps and we glance back at the HC monitor to see the cameras in the halls outside the bridge door relaying a scene of horror. It—he—runs at them from behind as they prepare to make entry into the bridge—an Obsidian, but larger than any I’ve ever seen. But it’s not just his size. It’s how he moves. A dread creature stitched from shadow and muscle and armor. Flowing, not running. Perverse. Like looking at a blade or a weapon made flesh. This is a creature that dogs would flee. That cats would hiss at. One that should never exist on any level above the first tier of hell.

He smashes into the kill squad from behind with two pulsing white ionBlades that extend out of his armor three feet from his hands. The Grays he simply runs through, crushing them into the walls with his shoulders, splintering their bones. Then he starts the real killing. It’s so savage I have to look away.

The heat drill continues melting the door of its own accord. And in its center forms a hole. Through it I can

see men and women dying. Blood sizzles on the overheated metal.

When the Stained is done, he’s bleeding from a dozen wounds, and there’s only one Gold left. She stabs him with a razor, piercing his dark armor through the breastplate. He twists his body, locking the blade in, and then clutching it when she lets the blade relax back into a whip. Then he grabs her by her helmet, her golden armor glittering under the hall’s lights. She tries to escape, tries to scramble away, but like a lion with a hyena in its jaws, he need simply squeeze. When she is gone, he lays her gently on the ground, tender now that he’s brought her a good death. Sevro involuntarily steps back from the door.

“Mothermercy …”

The Stained stands on the other side, the door between us slowly melting from the center. When the hole in the door is the size of a torso, he removes his helmet. A hairless, pale face stares as me. Eyes black. Wind-weathered cheeks armored with calluses like the hide of a rhinocerous. Head bald except a meter-long white shock of hair that hangs to his mid-back.