"I don't like this," Senrii muttered as she walked out of the fab building, looking over the eerie inorganic weapon in her hands. It was all wrong: right angles, clean lines, metal with not a bit of forgebone to be seen.

Case in point: the metal hammer wasn't derived from a pistol shrimp's striker, or built from tendons and muscles like a slingshot, or constructed like any other recognizable body part. Bile, it didn't seem to be connected to musculature at all.

"What? How can you not like this?" Aoife hefted her own grenade launcher. "It's like something out of a vidality! The heroes plunder the ancient tomb, coming away with powerful weapons of an earlier age."

"I like my tombs, my weapons, and my ages to be not quite so early," Senrii said. She gestured toward the hideous tower of clotted flesh pulsing past the edge of town, rotationward up the continental cylinder. "But I'm actually talking about that. Everything's going wrong."

"Nobody said it would be easy," Aoife chirped. "Cheer up. We're about to rescue Tvorh, and we have pretty new weapons." She stroked her launcher lovingly. "It could be a lot worse."

A scratching noise came from the direction of the tower, and Aoife blanched. It sounded like a thousand claws tearing holes through decaying flesh.

Senrii sighed. "You had to say it. Come on, Piotr. We've got some investigation to do."

Piotr cleared his throat. "Please consider regrouping, Maga Ductrix."

Senrii shook her head. "No can do. Whatever was stuck in that thing, it's free now, but if we're gonna figure out what happened in this place, you know we're going to have to fight our way in. Might as well pick up what ground we can right now."

"Um," Aoife said. "Can I, uh..."

"Go help Tvorh, Aoife."

The acolyte nodded quickly and turned in the opposite direction, bounding down the street.

"Hey, kid," Senrii shouted after her. "You tell him that after all this, he owes you a week in bed, at least."

Aoife blushed like Senrii hadn't known a Sodality acolyte could. Then she turned a corner and disappeared.

"Someone ought to get laid," Senrii grumbled, double-checking the grenade launcher's barrels.

Piotr hummed a wordless response next to her.

She glanced his way, taking in the shape of him, from his planted feet and the butt of his halberd against the living steel floor to his bald ebony pate. "I never have."

His eyes widened. "Begging your pardon, Maga Ductrix?"

"General Principles got to me, I guess. 'Do not sow your field with strange seed,' and all that. Besides, I never met the right man. Or I met him but never told him."

Piotr stared inscrutably at her.

"Well. Let's go."

They headed up the curving inside of the hab cylinder toward the tower of flesh. Willow trees waved in fake wind at the edge of town, but the base of the tower of strange flesh splayed out into the forest, dominating the landscape and poisoning the ground around it so that the vegetation was long since dead.

The scratching was loud, now. Senrii closed her eyes. Ping.

The static image of a distended bulge in the wide base of the flesh, like a meters-wide sore about to open, took Senrii's breath away. Hopefully the sonar image was worse than the real thing. Senrii halted in the trees a pistol's shot from the spreading foundation of flesh and hefted the grenade launcher. "You ready for this?"

"No," Piotr said.

"Me neither. Bile, I don't even know what this is."

The sore in the tower's flesh broke open and monsters poured forth.

The real thing was worse.

They weren't like Chimeras. They were just as twisted as the genetic aberrations of Tellus, but no two Chimeras had ever been as consistent as the beasts that streamed down the rotting tower to the forest floor.

They all had mustard-colored flesh sprinkled with grains of silver and horizontal spines, like dogs or horses, and were as large as jungle wolves. They all had mouths full of razor-sharp teeth just past waving antennas, and their forked tongues tasted the air. They all had six legs each ending in a pair of hooked talons that gripped the metal of the hallway, plus six arms rising along their backs with similar pincer-claws.

They all had membranous wings folded against its back; they all had nostrils and eyes that dotted their heads and their legs at regular intervals. And they all stank of sulfur, and silver grains of dust glittered in the air between them.

When they turned those terrible, bestial eyes on Senrii, she expected roars, but the only sound that broke the silence was the increasing clatter of their talons as they crawled faster between the stunted trees, doing a passable imitation of a low-gravity charge and kicking up tainted dirt as they came.

Senrii shook off her shock and lowered her head to the sights. "Shots in the hole."

She pulled the trigger. Whump. The ancient grenade launcher coughed, launching a metallic object like an oversized blunted bullet.

It impacted the crawling mass of flesh and roared an explosion of heat, sound, and metal that scorched Senrii's face and made her eardrums ring. The conflagration consumed the monsters, and Senrii staggered back as the force of the concussion upset her tentative balance in the low gravity. Piotr shoved his shoulder against her back before she could bounce more than a few inches.

The stink of burnt flesh and shrapnel-ridden blood joined the sulfur stench. "Bile!" Senrii stared in shock at the weapon as its next barrel and grenade rotated into place. She'd known this thing wasn't going to shoot vine mines, but she hadn't been prepared for the sheer inferno.

Maybe there was something to this "ancient weapons of power" nonsense.

The pseudo-daylight turned red, and an alarm began to blare as smoke drifted through the fake forest. Maybe exploding these monsters wasn't the best plan. This place might be huge, but it probably had a limited air supply.

The soft tearing of claws against dirt and leaves and the black flesh of the tower's base recommenced. Blood-spattered, flesh-burned monsters came crawling out from the smoke.

Whatever. It was a better plan than dying. "Round two," Senrii shouted. Since Piotr was holding his halberd, he couldn't cover his ears, but he flinched into a hunch next to her.

Whump.

Kaboom.

"Round three."

Whump.

Kaboom.

Senrii coughed as the smoke reached her nostrils, carrying with it the overwhelming stench of sulfur. Seriously, what did these things eat?

"Maga Ductrix, hold," Piotr said, putting out a hand to stop her from loosing again. "They are too close." He stepped in front of her, hefting his halberd, and planted his feet against the unsteady rotational gravity.

A storm of claws came sailing out of the smoke.

Piotr's forgebone halberd-blade glinted in the flickering red light as it smashed into the monster, taking it in the head and splattering azure blood on the ground and trees. The body bounced twice in the reduced gravity and bumped into Senrii's feet.

Senrii let the grenade launcher fall on its strap and fumbled for her pistol and her sword. "Pressure on my back," Piotr ordered as he reset his drifting feet.

Never mind the weapons. Senrii leaned forward into Piotr, bracing him.

He set his halberd and thrust it into a second charging monster, then swept the blade to fling away the corpse, which crunched into a third abomination clawing along the ground. The two bodies went bouncing back into the smoke.

His muscles twisted and turned as he struck. It would have felt really nice beneath Senrii's palms if they hadn't been fighting for their lives against an unidentified threat.

Piotr flung an arm across his eyes a fraction of a second before a storm of spikes flung from beyond the smoke impacted his armored skin. Senrii heard a sound like cracking forgebone.

Probably because that was what it was.

Piotr grunted in pain and extracted a hand-long, thumb-thick, mustard yellow spike from his chest and dropped it. It spun slowly to the ground, painted with Piotr's blood. "Hit hard," he said.

Then: "Down!" He turned, and his arms enfolded Senrii. She heard dozens of spikes smack into the armor of his back.

She also heard two distinct cracks from the impacts on his subdermal shell. Each one made him shudder and gasp, but he held on to Senrii, sheltering her from the murderous spines.

To the boneyard with this. The moment the rain of spikes paused, Senrii reached around Piotr, aimed her pistol by echolocation, and shot into the drifting smoke. Things shrieked as her forgebone bullets found flesh.

Piotr growled, and his body shifted against Senrii's as he prepared himself to get back into the fight. "Oh, no you don't," Senrii said. "Let me go and retreat." She couldn't risk losing him.

Not now.

"Never, Maga Ductrix." His tone said more than his words could. His devotion to her went far beyond the fact that she was the daughter of his liege-lord and best friend.

The same reason Senrii couldn't afford to lose him was the reason he wasn't going to let her face this horde alone. This bile-stained horde, born of a poisoned tower and crawling from the smoke.

Piotr released Senrii, roared, and spun, crashing his halberd down on the nearest of the monsters. "You stupid stubborn... ugh, idiot!" Senrii said, ducking out to one side as he swung to the other and placing a shot right in the swirling teeth of one of the monsters as its taloned arms slashed for Piotr. "I'll hold the wound in the tower. You retreat. That's an order."

"No, Maga." Piotr's steps were slow--was that because of the gravity or the blood loss?--but he set his feet again as the monsters came on.

And stopped a few feet away.

Perfect time to shoot them. Senrii raised her pistol. Except she didn't, because her arm refused to cooperate.

What on Tellus? It was killing time now, wasn't it? Killing seemed so... so...

So active.

"Maga Ductrix?" Piotr rumbled, telescoping the halberd to reduce its length. She could feel his confusion. "Are you with me?"

"I'm... I'm..." Senrii wasn't sleepy, exactly. She just didn't want to move. Motion seemed graceless. Even speaking was difficult. "Piotr, I can't move."

He pointed his halberd toward the monsters. "Nor can they."

Senrii reached inward for her SOPHIOS. You awake, Sophie?

Its answering hiss was lethargic. I... wait.

No waiting. We've got work to do.

Command...

Okay, then. I command it. Gas the bile out of those things.

Command... wait.

Usually when her SOPHIOS was recalcitrant, it just needed a kick to its metaphorical posterior to get it moving in the right direction, and Senrii's mental boots were forgebone-tipped. She gave it a psychic whack.

Apparently its posterior was forgebone, too, because the Wisdom didn't budge an inch. It was as frozen as Senrii.

The pressure of Piotr's back against her chest vanished as he stepped away from her. "Wait, what are you doing?" Senrii asked.

"My duty," he said. He glanced back at her as he flicked his halberd back to full length. His eyes met hers, and she read his intentions in them.

Duty, obligation, and desire were all one to him. He would have protected her even if he didn't care for her, just because of his relationship to Dorsin. Since he did care for her, that made his protection all the more necessary.

"Oh, no, Piotr," she slurred through a mouth that didn't want to move. "We don't know when they'll awaken."

"Then I must work quickly." His slow nod told her everything that he could never have found the words to say.

Then, with a roar, he bounded into the gritty smoke and laid about him with his halberd, striking flesh from bone. Chunks of meat bounced about, the silver-speckled yellow skin and blue blood barely distinguishable in the flashing red light.

If those things woke up from their paralysis, they would slaughter him, and Senrii wouldn't be able to act quickly enough to stop it. She strained, trying to raise her gun and pick off a few to lighten the load on Piotr the dervish. Her arm refused. She tried to tug her legs forward, to walk among them so she could be closer to Piotr, but her feet didn't obey her.

Her SOPHIOS still anchored her nervous system like a rock. Except at least anchors were useful for something.

Need. To. Help!

And then a voice called to her. Somehow she heard it as plain as the sunrise despite the klaxons blaring their odd mechanical noise. Senrii. My little girl.

She'd felt like this before. Outside Umutukk. "Mom?"

It felt like a hole in her soul. It was enough to make her believe in the spirit and in Adon and Yesh and all of that strange religion's demons. It terrified her.

Don't be afraid, came another familiar voice. Tvorh. We just need your help for a second.

"Tvorh? Did Aoife get you already?" Senrii asked.

No response.

As Piotr lopped off a monstrous head, a bit of blood drained from the crack in his chest's armor. He snarled in pain.

Senrii couldn't help. Piotr needed her. If they woke up--

"Excuse me, Maga Ductrix." This voice was Tvorh's mother. "The regia puella is taking action that may well spell the end of Tellus."

"And she's killing your father's mind," Mom added.

Oh, bile.

"Please, Maga Ductrix. You can help us, but there isn't much time," Meghan said.

The tug waited in her spirit, reaching for her. Oh, Piotr. I'm so sorry.

Senrii closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and submitted to unfiltered Synapsis.

***

First Mother joined them. Then Senrii. Then Rosabella. With every mind added, the gestalt widened. With every star that molded itself to the framework, Tvorh saw more and more of the genomes, both Oralie's and the xenokaryotic Symbiont's, unfolding like blossoms in Oralie's star. One petal, two, three.

Then Oralie tracked down Ductrix Lenaa and Dux Venkas and a dozen others and pulled them in, too.

Tvorh's consciousness expanded like a mother's outstretched arms. The two labyrinths of genes, strings of ribonucleic acids folded upon themselves millions of times, began to make sense, humming a beautiful harmony that Tvorh had only heard once before, sung by the Sodalitatis who had given him the Symbiont.

He traced through the two mazes, distributing his thoughts across the other members of the gestalt. Here were interfaces between the Symbiont's genes and Oralie's, allowing for physical attachment; he stored those in Senrii's mind.

Here some Symbiontic base pairs were inactive, though they had a magnetic pull toward the same portion of Oralie's genome that created the physical bond. Tvorh knew with certainty that if allowed to activate and bind, they would turn the Symbiont into a SOPHICS, a "Sequencing Organism, Prophage-Human Interface, Complete Symbiosis."

Oralie would cease to have a SOPHIOS, a Symbiont in "optimal symbiosis," and become a Tool.

Tvorh crammed that knowledge into Ductrix Lenaa's brain and kept far away from those base pairs.

Here was a hostile set of genes, red and black and angry, slavering to devour a certain subset of Oralie's. The genophage drew its power from here. It was true, then, that the genophage and the SOPHIOS were linked.

What did it say about the genophage that its very nature was written into the SOPHIOS?

Tvorh didn't want to know.

Tvorh dug deeper, slapping knowledge away into the herd of stars gathering around him, making his way toward the kernel of prime truths at the center of the Symbiont's genome.

He slammed into a wall. The information this deep was too dense. He needed to get into it, but he didn't have enough processing power. "Mother, Uxor Principis, can we bring in some of the purplebloods in the Libraratory?"

I'm sorry, Tvorh, Oralie's star pulsed. I can't sense them. Their half-Bound Symbionts aren't here.

"I need more power. Is there anyone else we can use?"

Thoughts skittered from Senrii through Oralie into Tvorh without stopping. It was strange, realizing that they were sharing so much knowledge, that his ideas weren't entirely his own.

It wasn't as strange as realizing what he had to do, however.

There was nobody else that they could gather in time. They'd have to track down Magi of minor Nethress bloodlines that could survive outside of Acerbia, open Synaptic attachments to them, convince them that this was real, and entice them in. They couldn't afford the delay.

Dorsin couldn't afford the delay, either, because Thiyyatt's mind was too strong.

And that was where the answer lay.

Tvorh had never expected his first command position to be over an army of mental stars, but why should his life start being predictable now? He turned the gestalt toward the massive Thiyyatt-star, which leaned down over the faltering Dorsin-star, sucking at its will.

He raised a mental knife-hand above his nonexistent head, then brought it slashing down. "Charge!"

The harmony in Tvorh's ears rose in a crescendo as the gestalt crashed through the abyss, slamming into Thiyyatt. Shocked, her star wavered. Tvorh didn't give her time to retreat. He pressed forward, absorbing Dorsin into his gestalt. He felt Oralie's and Rosabella's concern flare; their minds drew Dorsin back into the safety of their embraces, nursing his battered intellect, his wounded genes.

Tvorh overran Thiyyatt and pushed into her. Her wordless thoughts of rage and surprise burst into his psyche like a vine mine, with cutting thorns that lacerated his will. Tvorh pressed on, wrapping his intellect around hers and grappling her into submission. "Pile on!" he shouted to the others.

Senrii and Lenaa, Rosabella and Venkas, all leapt to the attack, lending the weight of their minds to the psychic assault. Thiyyatt struggled in Tvorh's grip, flailing with stray thoughts and alien ideas. How dare you!

"You wanted to be one with me," Tvorh pulsed. "Well, here you go." He tore at Thiyyatt's mind.

Thiyyatt howled at the violation, but it was no worse than what she'd done to others, with her pheromones and, worse, through Synapsis. He'd seen glimpses through Mother and through Senrii of the chaos Thiyyatt had caused in the world when she brought the pavane of stars to a halt, freezing Magi, Tools, and Chimeras alike.

Enough. She wouldn't hurt anyone ever again, not even if Tvorh had do horrible things to her to get her to stop.

Don't! Thiyyatt screamed as Tvorh plunged a limb into her open will. Her star quivered as he ransacked her memories.

A distant regina on a throne; haughty, self-interested, uncaring. Calling for the execution of a common girl who'd tried to escape an arranged concubinage to the regina's son. "So shall it be for all who refuse to do their duty. Your genes are not so rare and valuable as you think, strumpet. You are merely one of a thousand. Nine hundred ninety-nine shall feel no loss when your head rolls."

No wonder Thiyyatt was so terrible. Look at her mother.

Sitting on a bed, listening to the girl sob in the next room as Thiyyatt's brother, having taken his pleasure, left her alone. Too young to understand what it meant. Only knowing that her brother had done a bad thing to a helpless girl on the night before her execution.

Tvorh yanked at the memory, and Thiyyatt bellowed in terror and pain. A shock of guilt passed through Tvorh, but he still worried at the memory, trying to open a psychic hole large enough to dominate Thiyyatt's mind and force her into submission to the gestalt.

"Your brother will not be joining us, Thiyyatt." The regina, cold and regal. "And I think you know why."

Thiyyatt had poisoned him. As a six year old girl, she had killed her own brother. As he unspooled the memory from a whimpering Thiyyatt, he saw the child princess tremble, both from fear and from anger. She'd wanted to kill her own mother, too, for forcing the bloodless girl to do something so terrible and then putting her to death afterward.

But Thiyyatt hadn't been prepared to hear her mother's words:

"This is the ruthlessness that I have sought my whole long life, my darling. If your siblings cannot survive you, they cannot survive the throne. For as long as you live, Thiyyatt, I name you my heir. Defend yourself well, and you may sit in my place one day."

Tvorh violated more of Thiyyatt's memory, hating himself for the act, and felt little Thiyyatt's shock. A kind word from her mother was rare enough, but to be declared Ittu's heir? Even at her young age, Thiyyatt, eighth born of Ittu's fourth husband, had known that she would never touch the throne.

The temptation of gratitude had been too great. Many years later, Thiyyatt would slaughter more of her siblings; one day, she would even open her own schemes against Regina Ittu's life; but on that day, she had let her mother enfold her in her arms and kiss her forehead.

"My daughter, my heir."

Thiyyatt had only ever wanted a family: a mother to be proud of her, siblings who were family rather than competition.

Tvorh wrenched one more time at the memory.

Overcome by the agony of the torture, Thiyyatt's star pulsed one more time, and then its struggles lapsed. Tvorh felt the paths of Thiyyatt's neurons relax open.

He released the memory he'd been worrying away at, glad that he had no body in this place, because a body would mean vomiting. Gently, Tvorh let himself down into her thoughts and incorporated them into himself.

The same mind that had derived a permanent Stigmatic organ to arrest the genophage lay open like a book, and Tvorh had the eyes to read this one. He saw a bit of the answer gleaming in one cluster of her synapses, calling to him. Tvorh reached for it.

Then he paused. Thiyyatt's mind wasn't a book. It was a woman battered, drugged, undressed, and flung onto a bed, and he was about to mount her.

No. There was no other way, but Tvorh wouldn't become that man. With a finger of thought as gentle as a whisper, he touched only that cluster of synapses. Other spots and thoughts flared. With soft touches, he activated them as well. As they awoke, he felt Thiyyatt's own thoughts begin to stir.

The regia puella was waking up. His period of borrowing--not raping; borrowing--her thoughts was coming to an end. He could force himself on her again and fight her back down.

But he wouldn't. He was a better man than that.

Tvorh. It was more a groan than a word.

Hush. It's okay. I'm not going to hurt you any more. Somehow, he brought himself to kiss Thiyyatt's mind tenderly. I'm sorry.

She shivered at the touch.

I would have liked to be your family, Thiyyatt, Tvorh said. But family doesn't hurt each other, and you hurt us badly.

Thiyyatt's star shivered one more time. Then she bawled, Mama!

Tvorh felt a flare of compassion from Mother. Meghan's star swept through the gestalt, enfolding Tvorh and Thiyyatt.

Swept into a mother's embrace, Thiyyatt's mind wept.

And long disused portions of it came alive.

Awareness flooded through Tvorh. As Meghan held Thiyyatt, he touched the final portions of the regia puella's thoughts that hid long-lost secrets about the Symbiont.

And finally the gestalt understood.

It completed the harmony and sang the sound of the Symbiont.

Tvorh turned his attention toward Oralie, but as her thoughts were his, his were hers. Her mind's fingers already had her own genome in one hand and the Symbiont's in another. Following the pattern unlocked by Thiyyatt's mind, Oralie knitted this stray base pair in the one to that stray pair in the other, weaving together new connections like a quilt.

The last set of base pairs fell into place nigh-magnetically, and Oralie transformed.

Tvorh felt the change like a ripple in the ether of the sea of mind. He envisioned Oralie throwing her head back and drawing a deep breath as if coming up for air after ages underwater.

I see now, she pulsed. I am.

The frozen stars roared to life around them.

Surprise transmitted through the gestalt from one member to the next as Oralie said, Thank you, my dear family. Now, back to your bodies. We have work to do.

A rushing wind tore the gestalt from Oralie. As the last portion of Tvorh's star detached from hers, he sensed a flash of guilt. Not his own--though he knew he'd be feeling terrible over what he'd done to Thiyyatt for a long time--but Dorsin's.

And Rosabella's.

And then he gasped as the void became a dim room stinking of sulfur mixed with lavender and tendrils tightened on his wrists.