Senrii woke up back in her body just in time to see Piotr go down under a storm of talons. "Bile!" she spat, struggling to her feet.

A mustard-colored head whipped her way, spraying silver dust into the air, and a mouth yawned wide as the even-worse-than-hellhound launched its at her.

Senrii raised her pistol and blasted it straight in its swirling teeth. Blood spattered her blue. Probably. It was hard to tell in the fake scarlet light filtering through the trees, and anyway she was already pretty soaked.

As the corpse fell and bounced in the leaves, four of the monsters turned as one, fixing their horrible eyes on her. They drifted into a diamond formation, one on the ground, one on each side bounding off the trees, one jump-swimming through the leaves above. Senrii picked her first target and lanced a trio of forgebone bullets at its face.

It ducked its head and its skin shifted, like somebody had shoved a forgebone plate between its skull and its flesh. The bullets cracked against the plate and ricocheted down the hall. Blood, bones, and bile. They were learning.

The monster raised its head. Senrii read rage in its eyes. She backpedaled as it flung itself toward her and barely raised her shortsword in time to catch the beast in its throat.

She ducked as the next monster sailed past her. Its talons slashed a deep cut in the arm of her skinsuit, and blood welled from her forearm. Aiming by sonar, not turning to face it, she plugged two bullets into what passed for the thing's ass as she thrust with her sword into the eye of one of the monsters in front of her. "Piotr!"

His halberd rose like a banner in the pile of slashing flesh, and she saw him shake off some of the silver-dusted monsters like insects as he tried to crawl out from under the hellhound-pile at the edge of the tower's foundation of flesh.

His eyes met Senrii's, and then the monsters covered him up again.

Senrii performed a low-gravity roll under the last of the four monsters that had flung themselves at her, impaled its stomach, and left her sword in its corpse. She raised the grenade launcher both hands, aiming for the floor where dirt and steel met corrupting flesh just in front of the pile of monsters.

Three trigger pulls. Whump. Whump. Whump.

Three explosions rocked Senrii backward. Then, just as quickly, wind whipped her forward as the living metal and bulkheads, weakened by centuries of proximity to the black tower, gave way to icy void.

Empty vacuum tore free a half dozen of the monsters piling on top of Piotr and drew them spinning into the blackness of space. The monsters slipped into the void like motes of dirt tumbling down a disturbed anthill.

Senrii slid after them.

She dropped the empty grenade launcher and clawed for the trees, kicked with her feet as she skittered through dirt and leaves toward the hole. The air roared in her ears, somehow loud and distant, in cacophonous disharmony with the distorted blaring of klaxons.

The jagged hole in the floor tore mustard flesh and silver dust and cerulean blood from the monsters as they tumbled out into the void. Still those that remained continued to jab their talons down into the middle of the pile.

One of the beasts straddled the hole in the floor. Senrii hit it from one side, half-accidentally kicking it back toward the dogpile. At the same time, another of the monsters slid from the pile and smacked it from the other side. The beast's taloned legs scrambled to gain purchase on the floor as the force of empty vacuum tore at it.

Its arms thrust down into the pile, impaling its kindred.

They didn't care about killing one another. They didn't even seem to care about whether they got sucked out into space so long as they could kill Piotr first.

Bile. What were these things?

Senrii grabbed a sapling with one hand and brought her pistol to bear with the other. Silver sand grains irritated her eyes as she plugged a dozen shots into the dogpile. All at once, the monsters lost cohesion. A score of them fell into space within a few seconds amid a cloud of silver dust.

Piotr's halberd followed. And then Piotr slid after them.

He was on the other side of the hole.

She'd never make it. Unless--

Senrii dropped her gun, and the vacuum swallowed it greedily. At the same time she released the tree.

She followed her weapon out into the vacuum of space.

Impossible cold flashed from her feet up her legs, her stomach, her arms. The Symbiont bashed itself against her psyche in terror as vacuum tugged at her eyes, her nose, her mouth.

She heaved out all of her breath as she fell into nothingness, and with one hand she grabbed the edge of the jagged hole above her head. Living metal cut at her hand.

But she held on.

She grabbed for Piotr with the other hand as he slid past her into the unbearable dark. The painful way his weight wrenched her arm was nothing compared to the agonies of the airless void.

Vacuum seal, now!

The STIGMOS splashed itself through her body, sealing off her orifices, reinforcing her insides, and forming new organs to allow her body to break down water for its pure oxygen. Blind, deaf, dumb, and unable to piss, she could hang here and survive for minutes, at least.

But Piotr couldn't.

With a grunt that couldn't escape her now-sealed mouth, Senrii tried to pull him up, but he was too big, and the centripetal force of the rotating cylinder and the strength of the vacuum were too much.

Something moved around the hand with which Senrii clung to the outside of the ship. The living metal was reforming, trying to close the Patrick Henry's wound.

Trying to lock her outside.

Her heart pounding, Senrii tried again to heave Piotr up. It was no good. His limp body was too heavy--

Not body. It was his self. Not a body.

Not a corpse.

Please, not a corpse.

Metal flowed around Senrii's hand, slowly sealing the ship away. A few more seconds, and she'd be locked out here.

Locked out here, hallucinating silver sands and twin suns as her body suffocated to death and Piotr suffered worse.

She should have told him. It was stupid, just a dumb crush on a man almost three times her age, but she should have told him--

--And with Stigmata rejuvenating him, he looked good for a man almost three times her age!

She should have reconciled with Dad.

And Mom--she deserved better.

Oh, bile. Senrii was going to die.

Mom.

Mommy, she whispered mouthlessly.

A second black void tugged on Senrii, this one inside her mind, but after an instant its flow inverted, pouring something into her. And then Oralie was somehow there.

No, Oralie said, her voice forgebone. I am in control now. You will not take my baby.

Then she vanished.

Mom?! Senrii almost sucked in a shocked breath before remembering she had no mouth and no air.

She felt the rumble of the ship's metal through her hand first, and panic seized her at the thought that it was finishing closing after her. But then something grabbed her wrist and pulled her up.

Up, into the ship.

Vines heaved, flesh moved, dragging them to safety. The vacuum vanished. She clawed for purchase; her fingernails scratched dirt.

She spun down the vacuum-sealing STIGMOS. Three meters deep of leaves and dirt had been sucked away into the everlasting night, leaving Senrii heaving on the bare living metal floor. Klaxons blared in her ears and red light burned her corneas and she'd never been so happy to see, to hear, to suck in thin oxygen that stank of sulfur, to suffer the sensation of frostburn despite her skinsuit.

Half-formed grasping hands that had grown from the Silver Suns cyst's ship-spanning vines withdrew beneath the living metal floorboards. Had Mom just controlled the corrupted Tool?

Somewhat. For a time. Mom's Synapsis-voice rang tired in Senrii's head.

Senrii's thoughts swam, but she forced them back into order. Yellow flesh, dark spatters of blue blood in the red light, crawling down the tower toward her--

Piotr.

He lay twisted on the floor, lips frosted, eyes open and bloodshot. Crimson droplets stained his chin and streamed down his upper lip from his nose.

"Oh, no, no, no, no," Senrii whispered, crawling to him. His cheeks were so cold. His eyes so lifeless--

They blinked, and he coughed weakly.

Senrii sobbed wordlessly, buried her face in the crook of his shoulder, then shoved her lips onto his.

He barely moved. He tasted like blood.

She didn't care.

Senrii. Oralie's voice startled Senrii from the facsimile of a kiss. Then she heard the tearing of claws. More of the monsters poured down the tower.

They came on like death. She'd sheathed her sword in one of the other beasts, and it was either behind her or floating out in space somewhere. Her gun was gone. She had her STIGMOS, but she was low on mass-energy.

The monsters turned their alien eyes on Senrii.

Oh, bile.

Then they turned on one another.

Talons flashed from uncountable arms as they stabbed and slashed. They didn't dodge. They didn't move at all except to murder one. Silver dust danced between them, frantic, as if it wasn't sure what was happening.

Senrii's jaws dropped open.

Hurry, Senrii. Oralie's voice came through strained and distant. I can't hold them for long, my dear.

"Hold them?" Senrii thought back.

It's too strong, and I've no experience doing... Six arms rising from one of the beast's backs lifted up another of the monsters, impaling it against a tree before a trio of talons cut a chunk of the lifter's brain matter free. Doing this.

"What? What's too strong, Mom?"

The Relay in the tower, Oralie replied. The Master-Mind that corrupted the Silver Suns Tool and is now fighting you.

A chill even worse than the vacuum had been froze Senrii's blood.

I will fight it as long as I can. Take Piotr. Flee. Fight. Return to me.

"Are you sure--"

Go, dear, and I will come with you.

Senrii spared a glance for Piotr's bloodstained face. Then she popped a calorie pack, got her arms beneath Piotr, heaved him up, and half-staggered, half-bounced through the forest as the monsters slaughtered one another behind her.

This was going to be an incredible story, assuming any of them survived it.

#

"Filter out all files older than two thousand years," Eztli said over the sound of the blaring klaxons.

The holodisplay flickered red in the dim light. Eztli hoped it didn't die out before she'd gotten the information she needed.

AIda appeared like a shadow of light against the hologram. "Okay! The Tool didn't include timestamps, so all the ones I'm giving you come from the dates the logs went into our computer systems, in Tellurian years. I'll mark which entries come from the Operation Silver Suns with 'OSS' and which come from the Patrick Henry's computers with 'PH.'"

Without timestamps from the Tool, Eztli had no way to figure out the Last Era dating system. She frowned, but there was nothing to be done. In fact, knowing the Last Era dates might only confuse her. Nobody knew how long the inter-Era period during the pandemic had been, save that it was several generations. If Eztli assumed it had been seventy years but it was actually one hundred forty, that would throw off her understanding of the timelines by seven decades.

She'd have to find another way to link the dates from the logs back to the Current Era dating scheme.

A huge number of logs in the display vanished. Those that remained were written in High Post-Exarchian in the stilted language of a Tool.

Several of the log messages had thumbnail images of the stars associated with them. Eztli picked out one of the earlier ones and expanded it. The stars were glorious, like a scattering of silver sands on an inky beach.

The first log read, "(OSS): 2832 After Planetfall: Operation Silver Suns integration 21% complete," the entry continued. "Backing up data into vessel's electronic Tool system. Focusing attention on telescope integration. T minus three years, nine months, twenty seven days estimated until telescopes online."

Eztli skipped ahead a few centuries and opened up another log entry. The starfield in the background had changed somewhat. That was exactly what Eztli needed to calibrate her understanding of the timeline.

"(OSS): 3306 After Planetfall: Extratellustrial vessels confirmed."

Humanity had sailed to Tellus from Sol in this very extratellustrial ship, but the Silver Suns cyst had been attached to the Patrick Henry for centuries by the time of this log entry. It wouldn't have waited that long to log the discovery of the ship.

It had to be talking about different extratellustrial ships.

Eztli's hands tingled unpleasantly as she called up the next log entry. The starfield zoomed in to show a fraction of the previous entry's background. Individual stars had distinct, if tiny, shapes in the image.

A minuscule cylindrical splotch blackened one of those spheres of light.

"(OSS): 3307 After Planetfall: Incoming ships appear to be similar in form to local anomalous vessel. Velocity analysis indicates arrival in 1167 years. Extending nerves and integration into anomalous vessel to gather more information."

Eztli forgot to breathe for a moment. When she finally found her voice, it was a bare whisper. "Search all log records for reference to an anomalous vessel."

Most of the logs she was looking at vanished, replaced by older logs written in half-translated Exarchian.

Ancient logs; the earliest possible logs. Logs from the Planetfall. Nervous energy shuddered its way through Eztli's body as the fog of prehistory rolled back.

"(PH): 3 After Planetfall: 23 months, 25 days, 9 hours, 14 seconds since last crew log-in. Remaining on AI control."

("That's us!" AIda said. "Except I don't remember that.")

The log went on, "Analysis indicates heavy iron content in asteroid. Anomalous traces of carbon discovered on surface."

"Next message," Eztli said.

"(PH): 4 After Planetfall: 31 months, 29 days, 15 hours, 19 seconds since last crew log-in. Remaining on AI control."

"Assimilation of primary asteroid into masslesses complete. Commencing automated repair of zero point energy condensers. Secondary asteroid discovered. Strong carbon content. Probable source of anomalous readings."

"Next message."

This entry's picture was spattered with stars, save for a black tube blocking out a swath of light. "(PH): 4 After Planetfall: 33 months, 22 days, 10 hours, 1 second since last crew log-in. Remaining on AI control.

"Secondary asteroid is mobile. Probable artificial vessel. Viewports indicate parasitic attachment near central bridge. Object appears to have fallen dormant after initial impact. Aborting attempt to assimilate. Returning to orbit."

Her gut roiling, Eztli called up the next message.

"(PH): 4 After Planetfall: 33 months, 25 days, 7 hours, 16 seconds since last crew log-in. Remaining on AI control.

"Artificial vessel is following. Impact likely in four days. Defenses prepared to repel boarders."

The black tower object that had speared through the ship's habitats, that had spent all these eons slowly rotating along with the heavenwhale, was an alien vessel. No human hands had formed it.

More than that. It had been here when humanity had arrived.

Eztli choked down bile and commanded the ship to restore the more recent filter, from the Era of the Silver Suns Tool, and scrolled further in the logs, glancing with trepidation at the last thumbnail of the spots against the stars.

In the next message she read, the black splotches against the stars were minutely larger, and the view had zoomed out. "(OSS): 3505 After Planetfall: Records of hostile encounters found aboard anomalous vessel. I can...remember the deaths. Unknown locations. Unknown dates. If anomalous vessel comes from same source as out-of-system ships, probable extinction-level threat. Initiating urgent message to Strathlic. Alien fleet arrival predicted in 968 years."

"(OSS): 3507 After Planetfall: Anomalous vessel appears to act as a Master-Mind, sending messages via Synapsis to an unknown recipient. It was wise of the creators not to grant me a Synapsis STIGMOS. Alien vessel arrival predicted in 966 years."

The splotches against the stars in the images were even bigger now, and Eztli could see them clearly enough to tell that they were interstellar vessels, long and cylindrical and dark as the night sky.

Alien vessels.

Like the tower that had speared through the Patrick Henry.

"(OSS): 3556 After Planetfall: Symbiont... wrestling. How? Why? Possible poison in anomalous vessel. Sense foreign SOPHIOS attempting incursion. Performing complete neural backup into Patrick Henry's systems. I have informed them that I may need to be isolated and provided Keying instructions for doing so. Alien vessel arrival predicted in 917 years."

"Next entry," Eztli said, her voice shaking.

"(OSS): 3594 After Planetfall: The suns the silver desert the boiling heat so hungry so hungry Symbiosis Symbiosis Tellurian assimilation failed no no no, no, I'm not supposed to do this, these are my people my people so hungry for my people so hungry for people for Symbiosis so hungry for transformation we must telluform we must prepare the pools the breeding pools..."

It went on like this for pages of scrolling before cutting off abruptly: ">".

"Wow," AIda said. "Aliens...You'd think I'd remember something like that."

Why was the air so thin? Why was Eztli light-headed? Why couldn't she think of something, anything, to say, any commands to give to AIda, to this cursed tomb-ship?

She barely noticed the voices screaming in the hall. Senrii drifted in, a bloodied Piotr on her back, but to Eztli, there were only the damning logs.

Aoife bounded in as well, followed by Tvorh, who had a shivering, sweating Thiyyatt in his arms.

"Eztli!" Senrii shouted. "We've got to go. Come on!"

The sound of her name snapped Eztli from her reverie. Suddenly she recalled the missing puzzle piece. "Show me current images from the telescope."

The starfield was zoomed even farther back than the very first image, but huge splotches marred the stars.

"They're here," she whispered. "Oh, Smoking Mirror."

"You listening, Eztli?" Senrii shook her shoulder. "Come on! Out of here, now."

Eztli held up a trembling hand to stop Senrii. "AIda, use records from the log and telescope images. Cross-reference the star patterns. Determine relative dates for previous images." She took a deep breath. "Calculate the remaining time until the ships arrive."

Senrii fell still, staring at the hologram. "What did you do?"

AIda replied a moment later. "Planetfall would have been 4625 years ago. The aliens have been decelerating about two centuries. Otherwise, they would have been here already."

"Aliens? Blood, bones, and bile." Senrii ran a hand into her hair; no mean feat with Piotr hanging from her back. "These things are aliens."

AIda piped up again. "I calculate an arrival time in Tellurian orbit for the vanguard vessel of eleven months, six days, twelve hours."

Vanguard vessel. Eztli's eyes widened; then she squinted at the most recent image of the starfield. One alien heavenwhale loomed large in the foreground, the shadowy cylinder pointing straight toward Tellus.

Dozens and dozens of dots speckled the star-studded sky behind it.

"The main fleet'll arrive in about twenty-two months," AIda added.

Eztli staggered back from the console. She reached out, but there was nothing to grab. She ended up on the floor, watching the red lights spin overhead. Senrii looked down at her in concern.

"Fathers of my fathers," Tvorh said. "What's going on?"

"They made it," Eztli groaned as the vertigo. "The Symbiont. It's artificial. They made it to telluform the planet."

"Aliens. Aliens made the Symbiont." Senrii shook her head. "No. No. I don't know what in the boneyard you've discovered, but--"

"It was never our tool to use." Eztli blinked away tears and sat up painfully. "The genophage was the whole point. It's a poison. Lunja awakened it, and it started...telluforming us to be what it wanted. The Symbiont failed once thanks to Pellnias, but it's not going to fail again. It's paving the way for its creators." Human genes. Alien gene-eaters.

Genophages.

Smoking Mirror, or Adon, or Yesh, or somebody! Eztli groaned in despair. "We're not the Symbiont's masters. We're its food."

"Bile," Senrii muttered. "Bile, bile, bile... come on. Come on, Eztli. Get up. Get up!" She reached down, eliciting a groan from Piotr, and tugged Eztli to her feet. Eztli accepted the help gladly, gripping Senrii like a life preserver. "Those... those aliens are all over the ship. They're going to be here any second, and we can't fight them like this. We have to go now."

"You fought them?" Eztli asked.

"Yeah. After Blue Bitch woke this bile-pile up, they crawled out of the tower and came for us. They stink like Chimeras, and if anything they're even more psycho. Piotr nearly..." Senrii bit her lip, and pain flashed across her face.

"Uh," Aoife said, pointing at the display, "isn't that where our rocket was parked?" The wireframe of that spot was blinking red. The High Post-Exarchian words Defense systems down; retreat to safe location flashed on and off next to it.

Their shuttle had been overrun. How much longer before the aliens that Senrii and Piotr had fought, the aliens that had apparently almost killed Piotr, made it here?

Aliens. Monsters. But not as monstrous as the fleet that was coming. The fleet of literal genophages.

Genophages.

Chimeras.

Sulfur.

"Wait," Eztli said. "Aida, analyze the atmospheric content of the Patrick Henry."

The Tool responded almost immediately. "By volume: 78.09% nitrogen, 20.93% oxygen, .93% argon, .01% carbon dioxide, .01% sulfur dioxide, trace amounts of other gases."

"Oxygen's a little low," Senrii pointed out. "So is carbon dioxide."

"But sulfur dioxide is extremely high compared to human norms," Eztli said. "Much more and it will poison us. Now that they're awake, the aliens must be cannibalizing the oxygen."

"Why? What's so important about that?" Senrii asked.

"Volcanoes," Tvorh murmured, as if he was dreaming. "Ash in the sky. Oh, fathers. These things breathe sulfur dioxide, don't they?"

"Chimeras must as well," Eztli said. "At least somewhat. Consider their stench. If we can scrub the gas, maybe that'll return the aliens to dormancy." Or even suffocate them.

The display glowed brighter and then settled back down. AIda sounded almost apologetic as she said, "Atmosphere scrubbers are at three percent efficiency."

Eztli slammed a hand on the desk. "Get them up and running!"

"I can't! The whole ship's going haywire. Your Tool's nerves are wrapped around my systems, and they're connected to the alien tower ship thing's nerves, and it's waking up more every second and screwing everything up. I barely have control of anything any more. I'm producing some ammo for the turrets, because I think you're gonna need it, but just the fabs are taking most of my compute power."

Senrii gasped and put up a hand. "Wait a second. I know someone who can help." She squeezed her eyes shut tightly. "Someone who can reconfigure even the corrupt Tool in this place."

"Who?"

"Our own Relay. Our own Master-Mind." Senrii chuckled, though she kept her eyes clenched shut. "My mom."

#

Town Synakirk, Highkirk, Nethress Wildlands

Oralie raised her head and listened with the Ascended Symbiont woven throughout every cell of her body. She didn't care that the Adonist councilmen in the war room were staring at her. She didn't care that her husband had stopped talking.

Mom? Mom, we need you.

She heard Senrii calling from far away, and that was reason enough for her to send her mind into the void again.

The hole in her being was always there, waiting for her to step through it. She would fall in no longer, for now she was an Imperatrix of Synapsis. No; she was a Imperatrix of blood and flesh and the very code of life itself.

Oralie stepped through the hole into the black sea, and silver stars shied away from her as blue stars formed a throne.

Seated in her palanquin of light, Oralie sought the comforting azure glow of her daughter and found it clustered alongside Tvorh's bright star. She rushed through the deep toward them, and silver stars scattered like a wolfpack of thousands cast into disarray by a stampede. Oralie was only one woman, but in this place she had the power of hundreds, perhaps thousands.

Oralie fell into Senrii without a hitch. When she had been trapped here, it had felt like falling forever down a bottomless pit. Now, however, she flew at will through the Relay-Space, the Master-Mind System, the void of stars, the domain of thoughts.

She rose up into Senrii, and the girl's mind gave way with no more resistance than a cloud.

Mom! Senrii said as Oralie--no, as Senrii blinked. She stood in a room of metal. Cold artificial lights glowed all around Senrii, not merely on the ceiling and the walls but also hanging in midair. Eztli, Piotr, Thiyyatt, Tvorh, Aoife--they were all there.

"I'm here, darling," Oralie said.

"I've got her," Senrii said to the others. "We--"

Oralie felt Senrii's attention snap away as she addressed Tvorh, but Oralie could also sense the agitation burning at the back of Senrii's thoughts. Not wanting to distract her daughter, Oralie reached into Senrii's willing mind and plucked out her concerns.

Sulfur dioxide scrubbers? Oralie didn't know how to gengineer those, but Tvorh's mother knew a great deal about the production and removal of airborne particles. Meghan could certainly help if Oralie was willing to bridge the gap to the corrupted Silver Suns Tool.

How strange it was to have all this knowledge in an instant.

Oralie wanted to enfold Senrii in her embrace. Instead, she said, "I will find Meghan. She can assist."

Senrii's response came at the speed of thought. Meghan? Why?

"She knows how to rearrange particles and aerosolize them. I can dominate the Silver Suns Tool, but I don't think I can command it to grow new organs outside of its purview."

Bile, Senrii thought. I was hoping that wouldn't be necessary. Tools are human. Nobody can change their genetic code without making them susceptible to the genophage. I mean, if we had a scrubber STIGMOS, we could bind it to the Tool's Symbiont instead, but we don't have one. Except... Tvorh's done some crazy improvising with STIGMOS these past few weeks...

"Tell him to open his mind, and I'll bring Meghan. The two of them can design what we need." With a mental nod of the head, Oralie left her daughter behind and winged through the void to where the Symbiontically-linked minds of Acerbia were gathered. She found Meghan's attention in the war room, reviewing a shortsphere comm that had just come in to Ductrix Lenaa.

"Antiprinceps Dorsin of Nethress, this is Magus Comes Caxatl Generosus Ortus Nxtlu, Captain of the Huitzilopochtli, Admiral of the Second Fleet. Surrender, and your family will not be harmed. You have one hour."

Lenaa growled as the Nxtlu admiral's message came to an abrupt end, but Oralie was already thinking. Nxtlu weren't even waiting for the rest of the fleet to arrive. And why would they? Nxtlu commanded eighty ships in the fleet near Acerbia, and Nethress had eighty all told--but the Nethress skywhales were spread across their holdings, and this was, for all intents and purposes, a sneak attack on Acerbia. By the time Nethress reinforcements arrived in a week or longer, Nxtlu would be even more reinforced. Why not begin the bombardment now?

It made tactical sense, even though Oralie wasn't a tactician herself. She must have picked some of these principles up from Dorsin's mind--

Dorsin-

Dorsin-Dorsin-Dorsin! The name echoed like a gunclap recursing through Oralie's thoughts.

She shut it away in time to hear Ductrix Lenaa say, "We're out of time. Order the perimeter defense cannons to defensive posture, scramble the gunboats, and get the fleet in the air. We have to hold them."

"But--" Comes Lester, an adoptee of a minor branch of the family, began.

"Princeps Dorsin isn't here, and we would never give him up if he were," Lenaa said. "Thunderhammer will keep their ships from getting too close. Now get me some defenses against bombardment and their fighters. I don't want a single mine or gunboat to land in city limits as we're getting our ships in the air. Also deploy the ground troops and send word to the militia that we'd be grateful for their help if Nxtlu lands troops."

"They might not want to help," Comes Lester pointed out. "Captain Cornartis isn't here to give them orders. Plus, they might not be in a helping mood after that message from Nxtlu..."

"Then tell them that if they don't defend Acerbia, there won't be an Acerbia to defend. Either Nxtlu will level it, or we will," Lenaa snapped. She looked around the room. "Well? Get to it!"

The room burst into motion, and Oralie, too, remembered why she was here. "Meghan, our children need our help again."

Uxor Principis Oralie? You're back. Meghan's attention wavered between the war room and Oralie. How may I help?

"I understand you're busy. This is crucial, however. Tvorh's survival might depend on it."

And Senrii's?

Oralie drew closer to Meghan's star. Despite the fact that Meghan hadn't called Oralie, Meghan's mind provided no more resistance than Senrii's had, and far less than the aliens--that was what they were: aliens; Senrii's terrible memories attested to it--that Oralie had taken control of. Perhaps it was because Meghan was now part Tool.

Just like Oralie.

But Meghan was a component of a larger Tool, so her star was far larger than Oralie's was. Oralie could only sense a portion of Meghan's thoughts, though she could see that part with total clarity.

Oralie admitted, "Senrii's survival also depends on us."

What do our children need?

"Oxygen. More accurately, they need sulfur dioxide scrubbers. Here. Let me show you." As she swept Meghan away into the void, Oralie was shocked at how little resistance she felt from the woman's mind, and she realized that even though Meghan was stationary, through the Relay-Space she might be able to experience the whole world.

I would like that, Meghan said. Life is... lonely.

Oralie's star blushed pink as the throne whisked them away. She hadn't realized how strongly she had been thinking that. Clearly she still had a great deal to learn about the powers of Apotheosis.