All The Stars To Cinders

What is love, to a Protean Hunter? Love is a dance where the slightest misstep spells death. Love is the thrill of the hunt, the terror of her quarry as their end becomes inescapable. Love is her jaws closed around their neck, biting and tearing, each gush of blood proof of her devotion.

Love is when she sinks in her teeth and never lets go.

I've got your scent now, Inanna. And I'll hunt you to the ends of the galaxy.

Red Eris is broken, undone. Only once before has she come this close to death. Silhouetted against the all-consuming white light of the nova is Inanna’s Vengeance, sword thrust under Eris’s chin. Her eyes burn with lilac flame in her silver death-mask face, pinning Eris with a pitiless gaze. If Inanna wanted to, she could kill her right now.

“Submit.”

She has never been this helpless before. The thought should terrify her; instead, it excites her. Finally, an opponent worthy of her full attention.

The dusk cobra venom should have entered her heart by now. Surely, with just a little bit more time, Inanna will shut down.

You should be dead! she wants to scream.

Is that truly what she desires? A more satisfying victory would have been to humble the Knight, making her bow and scrape before Eris for all to see. But the venom is already flowing through her body; how vexing that she would rather die than abandon her pride. Perhaps this will be a draw after all.

Seconds drag on, but the Knight shows no signs of keeling over. Is her heart made of titanium too, like they say? She knows there is flesh in that tin can; the evidence is smeared across her face. But Inanna has her dead to rights. There is no negotiation to be had with a sword at her throat. If she found some way to counteract the toxin, then this duel is over.

No point in martyring herself for a mere duel. There’s always the next hunt.

“I submit.”

Oh, mother dearest is going to have words with her about this.

***

“This is an embarrassment for us all, Bliss.”

Elder Violette glares disapprovingly at her daughter over the rim of her wine glass. She is always Elder or Violette to her face; calling her Mother would be blasphemy. Not that it stops Bliss from thinking it. The Budding Mother has better things to do than intrude upon her thoughts.

Bliss sips her own wine, a fine rosé from the ship’s hydroponic vineyard. Her study aboard the Chrysalis is grown from living mahogany sculpted into elegant arches and decorative knots, lit by orange and pink bioluminescent flowers. The Hunter quarters are in the core of the ship, but a holographic window displays a real-time projection of the view outside: stars blurring and streaking together, a rainbow of shifting colours as the ship slips through infraspace. Never let it be said that she doesn’t travel in style.

“Knight Valour,” she says, her tongue caressing the name ever-so-sweetly, “is a formidable opponent, Elder. Did you think that Adamant House would send anything less than their best to the Nova Ball?”

“You read the dossier I procured for you, did you not?” The hologram of her mother sitting in the armchair opposite her flickers a little. She wears a finely tailored black suit, subtly shimmering with an oil-on-water pattern, reinforced with silk-steel to repel small arms fire. Her features are strong, weathered, quite dissimilar from Bliss’s own. She takes after her other mother more. “All our intelligence points to her being a dropout from the Reliquary Knight program. She has had that Seraph for a few scant years. You were raised with Red Eris; she grew alongside you. My darling girl, how could you fail after all the opportunities I gave you?”

It’s always like this with Violette. She expects the best of Bliss. Her cheeks burn with shame; despite the years, she always finds herself at a loss when her mother speaks to her like this. She is a Hunter, stained with the blood of thousands, a goddess in carmine, but in front of her mother’s stern face she feels like a little girl again.

It’s a feeling of disempowerment she’s not eager to repeat.

“She’s like me,” Bliss says.

“Is she, now?” Violette cocks an eyebrow. Her presence is undeniable, even projected all the way from the Protean heartlands. Bliss has always admired that about her; she can silence a room with a look. “Has she, too, been welcomed into the Mother’s Embrace? Does her heart beat as one with her siblings? She is cold and alone, Bliss, a creature of steel and carbon fibre.”

“I mean that I see the same drive in her. She’s insatiable, always striving for new heights. Nothing can stand in her way until she gets what she wants; I don’t think anything short of death would slow her down. That’s why she won.”

Bliss belatedly realises she has said too much, hefted her bleeding heart on the scale for Violette to measure. Valour is an enemy, to be hunted and destroyed. Has she truly infiltrated Bliss’s thoughts so deeply?

“If she is so admirable, as you say, then perhaps I should be in the market for a new daughter. After all,” Violette leans forward, crimson wine sloshing in her almost-empty glass, “she beat you.”

Bliss freezes. Even from light-years away, that cutting tone in her mother’s voice is as effective a threat as any blade.

Violette barks a laugh, gesturing to her primate familiar to refill her wine. When the glass is filled, the lemur-like genesplice flickers out of the projection’s view. “Don’t look like that,” she says. “I could never replace you, darling. You may not be my first daughter, but you are quite singular in that field.”

Bliss has never met any of her sisters. Most of them died before she was born; the only one who still lives is retired comfortably on a garden world in the imperial core, tending to her cultivars in peace. In a word, boring. Violette has outlived the rest, granted eternal life by the Budding Mother for her devotion as an Elder. Outwardly she appears to be in her fifties, but she is closer to three hundred years old. Little wonder Bliss feels like a child next to her at the tender age of twenty-four.

“The duel was… a miscalculation,” Bliss blurts out. “I’m sorry, Elder. My judgement was impaired. I’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

It burns her right down to the heart to apologise like this. Red Eris did the best she could. Her claws were sharp; her instinct was keen; her venom was prepared by Summer especially for the occasion. How was she to know that her opponent was so eager to die to prove her worth? She clearly recalls Valour’s stoic expression on that night a week ago, putting on a brave face for the crowd, all the while afflicted by Eris’s agonising venom.

She would dearly love to see what would finally push that woman over the edge.

“Again?” Violette says. “There will not be another duel like this for you, Bliss. The Chorus have already made their decision. If you wish to prove yourself, do it on the battlefield.” She sighs. “I am sorry too. I told them my daughter was destined for higher things, but the consensus of the Elders went against you regardless. I am assured it was for the greater good of the House.”

Bliss’s grip on her wine glass tightens, almost hard enough to shatter it with her gene-spliced strength. She longs to hurl it at the wall, but what would that accomplish apart from making a mess? Soon enough, she will have the opportunity to let go and forget about this humiliation; Ash has finally stopped making off-colour jokes about it in the mess hall.

She needs to hunt. Very soon, she will have the opportunity to spill blood again.

“Thank you for speaking up for me, Elder. I disagree strongly with the Chorus’s decision, but I respect their consensus in this matter.” Her lessons in etiquette prove invaluable; she manages not to swear even once.

“As you should,” says Violette. “Good morning, Bliss.” Without another word, her projection dissolves into motes of light.

Bliss is calm and contained in her anger, as a Lady of Protean House should be. When a knock at her door comes twenty minutes later, she is dressed in her exercise clothes, laying into a punching bag with enough force to send it flying with each blow. One final mighty punch and the bag ruptures, spilling sand onto the floor.

She grabs a towel and wipes off the sweat as she crosses her suite to answer the door. Worry and pain spill through the bond from the two Hunters waiting outside even before it slides open. Ash, short and muscular with a buzz-cut, stands in the winding branch-corridor. Hasret lurks behind them, thin and strung-out, the bags under her eyes heavier than usual.

“The call went that bad, huh?” says Ash with a grin, sensing her anger through their shared bond within the Mother’s Embrace.

“Yes,” she says simply. “Are you all right, Hasret?”

Hasret shakes her head. Ash says, uncharacteristically sombre, “Doc had to run more tests than usual. Thought it wouldn’t be right to just let her come over on her own. You’ll be fine with Bliss, right?”

“Always,” says Hasret.

“Great. I’ll leave you two lovebirds alone, then.” Ash bows dramatically and takes their leave.

The door slides shut behind Hasret as she steps inside. Her arms and legs are supported by an exoskeleton of cultivated muscle and bone, beautiful in its practicality. She hangs from it limply, like clothes on a line, hollowed out by the Phage. Bliss slips her arms around Hasret gently, brushes her wavy hair aside to kiss her neck the way she likes.

“I’m a monster,” Hasret said once, after she lost control of Anathema for the first time. “You deserve someone who won’t hurt you, someone who isn’t broken.”

“You’re no monster, sweetheart,” said Bliss. “But even if you were, who better to love a monster than another monster?”

Here and now, she is real and warm, her exoskeleton digging into Bliss’s skin, her hands undoing Bliss’s ponytail and running through her hair. Hasret smells of antiseptic and sandalwood cologne, feels alive despite everything. Through the bond Bliss feels her exhaustion and joy as she melts into her lover’s arms.

“I missed you,” says Hasret, in between kisses.

“You saw me yesterday,” says Bliss.

“Even so.”

“Want to sit down?”

“Please.” Hasret sits in the armchair recently vacated by Violette’s hologram; Bliss sits in her usual spot opposite.

“Tell me what happened with the doctor,” says Bliss. “If she hurt you without cause, I’ll tear her throat out myself.”

“Do you really have to talk that way about Dr. Kitamura? She’s done so much for me. Half the flight physicians in the Division wouldn’t even consider my case; they’d rather offer me euthanasia. At least she treats me like a human being and not a problem to be contained.”

“And the tests?”

“They were,” Hasret sighs, “so exhausting. I don’t think I’ve even heard of some of the scanners she put me through, and I’d be surprised if I had any blood left in my body after how much she took. Bone marrow, too. She wanted to know how much of my skeleton has crystallised.”

Sometimes the crystals are visible under her ochre skin, pulsing with sickly green light, counting down the seconds until her death. Hunters cannot expect to see old age, whether felled in battle, lost to the wilds or committed to the recycling tanks to rejoin the Mother, but in all likelihood Bliss will outlive Hasret. They knew this from the start, agreed to make the most of the time they have. The candle that burns half as long burns twice as bright; to Bliss’s eyes she is brilliant, incandescent, essential. When she shines, she can burn worlds.

“Will you be all right for the hunt?” asks Bliss, concern creeping into her voice. If she pushes herself too hard...

Hasret gives her a look of infinite weariness. Shadow falls on her face, deepening the lines beneath her eyes. “I don’t really have a choice.”

“At least get some rest before we finish our jump. You look like you need it.”

“That’s probably wise.” Hasret yawns widely. “Before I forget, Summer has been in her greenhouse all day. She’s not responding to the bond. Can you go and check on her?”

“Is everyone else scared of the witch? Even Bear?” Bliss smirks.

“They just don’t want to get poisoned for interrupting her again. Kavia was in and out of the head all day after last time, remember?”

“Of course. It is I alone who will brave the witch’s den. If she ties me up and has her way with me, it’ll be your fault!”

Hasret shakes her head with a faint smile. “I’ll never understand what you see in her.”

“I have a taste for danger.” Bliss pecks her on the cheek and leaves her to nap. Behind her, the ship’s nanomites begin to clean up the sand spilled from the punching bag. They have an eventful day ahead of them; violence is best committed on a good night’s sleep.

***

Aboard the ship’s axial tram, Bliss finds her thoughts drifting inexorably to Valour once more. She thumbs through the dossier on her tablet; the Knight’s life is splayed out before her as if vivisected on an operating table. Nothing in this dry data file, rendered in green holographic letters, conveys the reality of the woman she met at the Nova Ball. A date of birth (two years before Bliss), a service record dominated by the Reliquary Knight program, a list of over a hundred confirmed Seraph kills. There is nothing in there about her blunt, straightforward manner, her utter stubbornness in the face of death, or her deliciously broad shoulders. (Behave.)

The tram stops with barely a whisper, and the doors open with a pneumatic hiss to admit a new passenger from the training halls. Bear ducks under the door-frame and straightens to her full considerable height: a grizzled, war-scarred, powerfully built woman, larger than anyone Bliss has ever met. Her lucent amber eyes flick towards Bliss in acknowledgement before she takes her seat.

Bliss has learned not to expect conversation from Bear; she is lost to the wilds in the way many veteran Hunters are. She lives only to train, eat, sleep and hunt. Rarely does she speak more than a single word at a time. She has cast away her old name and chosen one less unwieldy, more fitting for her endless hunt. From the bond Bliss receives only a faint hum of contentment in the knowledge that the flight will be hunting soon.

The tram resumes its journey down the trunk of the ship. The Chrysalis is over a kilometre long; Ash could quote its dimensions off the top of their head, but Bliss has no head for memorising statistics. The ship resembles a vast, slender tree shot through with a honeycomb of rooms, veined with pipes and cables for electricity and air as well as xylem and phloem. Its bark is metallic, grown to withstand nuclear explosions, and its branches are clustered with weaponry. The chariot ship’s true defence, however, is its flight of eight Seraphs. For Bliss and her flight-mates, the Chrysalis is both forward operating base and home.

Bliss lingers on the portrait in Valour’s file. It must be from early in her transition; she has shoulder-length hair, looks uncertain and awkward in her newfound femininity. She feels a rush of gratitude that she was able to get that stage over and done with in childhood. Reorienting one’s life so thoroughly as an adult is a painful experience, as Hasret and her Hunter friends have related at length. Valour has not enjoyed the privileges she has. What must it have been like, to be born to fill the shoes of a dead man, to be expected to give up one’s own individuality and be subsumed by a parasitic ghost?

In this moment, she hates Shattermoon. If his rebirth had come to pass, he would have selfishly deprived the universe of her Valour in all her vibrancy.

Her Valour? Perhaps she’s getting ahead of herself. But that duel must be seared into the Knight’s memory as it was in Bliss’s: the pain of Eris’s bite and the rush of hard-won victory. Bliss is infected by her; it seems only fair that she has wormed into the Knight’s thoughts too, implanted herself like the Mother’s Gift.

Don’t you dare forget about me. We have a score to settle.

Radiant artificial sunlight tinged with green spills through the windows as the tram emerges from a tunnel into the biodome. The line is suspended high above the hydroponic farm stacks and the autumn colours of the gardens. And there, off to one side, is a hermetically sealed glass dome, a witch’s lair filled with a rainbow of deadly plants: the toxicologist’s greenhouse. Bliss tugs on the psychic bond, waving from the tram window. After a moment, the blurred figure of Summer waves back from inside the greenhouse.

-Bliss; lovely! Summer projects to her through their bond. -You’ve just volunteered yourself to help replant these strangling briars.

-Oh, the travails of love, Bliss replies.

The station pulls into view and Bliss stands to leave. With a sudden rush of movement, Bear towers over her, firmly grasping her shoulder with a friendly grin that bares her filed-sharp teeth. “Don’t worry too much about your first hunt, Linnea. I’ve got your back!”

Linnea? My mother? But she’s…

Consigned to the recycling tanks. The same place Bear must be dredging this borrowed memory up from. Bear isn’t herself, and Bliss is not the Hunter she thinks she is.

How should she extricate herself from this situation? The words come to her tongue unbidden: “I’m not worried, Amalthea. Don’t treat me like a child. I know Persephone’s Ascent better than my own body. Trust me to do my job and the hunt will go just fine.”

Bear’s smile fades; she lets go of Bliss’s shoulder. Stumbling out of the tram door onto the elevated concrete platform, Bliss clutches her temples. Her head feels ready to split open. Coloured spots float across her vision. She slumps on a nearby birch-wood bench until her sight returns to normal and the headache fades. What was that? She has never been prone to migraine attacks.

The words she spoke must have been Linnea’s side of the conversation. Violette would know more about her departed wife, but as an Elder her schedule is always packed; she has little time for Bliss.

She will have to leave her questions for later. Summer is waiting.

A harvest-beast lumbers past as she exits the elevator at ground level, carrying stacks of fresh algae on its back. It resembles a cross between a giraffe and a centaur, with a thick torso that extends up thirty metres to the highest farm stack, equipped with six pairs of nimble arms to perform its job. As a child Bliss was deathly afraid of the beasts and their high, keening calls, but now she understands their place in the hierarchy of being. They have their purpose just as humans do; every creature under the Mother’s rule is joined by her hyphae into a mycelium that transcends physical space. Besides, they are docile and herbivorous. A Hunter should not be frightened of prey.

In the airlock of the greenhouse, she slips on a freshly woven hazard suit. This orange reinforced silk-steel will protect her against the barbs and toxins of the plants within, and the transparent helmet will filter her air clean of any contaminants. Thus prepared, the light above the inner door turns green and the entrance to the poison garden slides open with a rush of sweltering heat.

The deadliest plants of long-lost Earth could never compare to the botanical bounty of Protean House. The greenhouse is a jungle of stinging vines and hypnotic golden flowers, trees with acid-spitting boles and parasitic red mushrooms that burrow into flesh. It is alarmingly, terrifyingly beautiful, and one of Bliss’s very favourite places on the ship. This is her armoury.

From deeper into the labyrinth comes a high, sweet voice singing an old spacer folk song, one of Summer’s favourites. Bliss takes the paved path towards the sound, ducking beneath branches and dodging the grasp of entangling roots. Her breathing is amplified in the helmet, drowning out the noise of creaking vines and dripping water. She is acutely aware of the thin suit that is the only thing between her and excruciating death. This is nothing like being Red Eris, whose carapace is a second skin, whose claws rip and tear with brutal ease. In this body, any manner of thing could kill her in an instant.

Perhaps that is what excites her so about Summer; she was the first person to make her feel hunted.

The singing lures her into a clearing. Here, the plants are quiescent, as if listening to their mistress. Every flower is rapt, turning towards the sun: Summer, in her radiance. Her stature is petite, less than intimidating to the unaware. She wears a similar hazard suit to Bliss, but her gloves are lined with golden wires which run down her fingers and extend out like roots into the garden. Everything within these glass walls dances to her tune.

Summer kneels over a thicket of strangling briar, deftly holding its bulk in place with a golden web. Bliss watches her work with practised motions, her gloved fingers moving deftly as if playing an instrument. The strangling briar is Summer’s weapon of choice. Empowered by her Seraph’s divine spark, it can entangle a battlefield in moments. Its thorns are exquisitely lethal.

“You’ll be good for Bliss, won’t you?” Summer says as she plants a writhing, head-sized clump of briar in a waiting plot of soil. The plant does not respond, but she seems satisfied and releases her web. Her blonde hair is done up in a bun underneath the helmet; her face seems entirely too innocent for the cruelties she is capable of. Such sweet cruelties, though...

“There’s an hour left until the briefing, Summer.” says Bliss. “You’re not thinking of hiding out in here the whole time, are you?”

“I know, I know! My head is still mostly screwed on. There’s a pair of manipulator webs on the bench there. We can talk while we work.”

Bliss clips the golden wires to her suit gloves and sets to work, wrapping another briar in her web. The psychic technology responds effortlessly to her command; the Mother’s Gift makes controlling such devices as simple as an extra limb. Still, most of the other members of the flight are poor gardeners. Once again, she has been roped into helping Summer out, but she can’t find it in herself to mind. The company, after all, is good.

“If you wanted to see me, you could have just said so,” says Bliss.

“Darling, you had such an important call to make!” says Summer. “I can bear to be away from you for a while.”

“You lost track of time, didn’t you?”

“A little.” Summer’s nose wrinkles as she smiles apologetically. “But how did it go? Has the Elder reassigned you to Cyst duty?”

“You shouldn’t joke about that.” Hasret wouldn’t like it. “The Chorus has suspended me from duelling.”

“And you’re feeling…”

“Like I could crush something in this web right now if I wasn’t surrounded by your beloved plants.”

“Thought so.”

Bliss lets go of her newly planted briar and flexes her fingers experimentally. “The hunt will set me right. It’s been too long since I scratched the itch.”

“Now you’re sounding like Bear.”

“Please. As if she could string together that many words at once.”

Summer makes this job look easy; as they speak, she delicately uproots two more strangling briar bushes at once. “She’s said some very strange things to me, you know. I think she’s mostly recycled memories at this point.”

“Do you ever get memories like that?” Bliss says, furrowing her brow. “From the tanks?”

Summer, crouched over the soil, looks up at her. “Instincts, mostly. The usual. When I’m Titania, sometimes I get déjà vu, like I’ve been on this hunt before. I know what to do. Nice to know our predecessors are watching over me—or breathing down my neck, telling me not to fuck this up.”

“Bear said something to me on the tram, from one of her old memories. It must have dredged something up in me; for a moment, I was my mother on her first hunt.”

“Violette?”

Bliss shakes her head. “Linnea. The one I never got to meet.”

“That’s a hell of a coincidence,” says Summer. “Of all the old Hunters that could have been mixed into Red Eris, you get one with a personal connection?”

“Maybe it’s the Budding Mother looking out for me.”

“That would be just like you. It’s not enough to be nobility; now you’re receiving messages directly from the goddess herself?”

Bliss bats her eyelashes. “What can I say? I must be her favourite princess.”

Summer snorts and pats the soil smooth with a gloved hand, bedding her last briar in place. “You’re so lucky I love you. That level of arrogance deserves to be punished.”

“Promise?”

Summer rolls her eyes. “You’re incorrigible.”

Bliss makes a moue in mock indignation. “I’m delightful.”

“You’re also not done yet.” Summer straightens, putting her hands on her hips as she watches Bliss finish her planting. “If you want my advice on those memories of your mum’s, you need a stimulus to bring them out. Do you have anything of hers?”

“There’s the leaf I kept from her tree, but I suppose that’s not really hers. It was grown after she died.” Inspiration strikes her: a keepsake long-forgotten. “Oh, I just remembered! I have a necklace of hers. I’ve never worn it, though.”

“That’s perfect! You could try that. Sleep with it, maybe.”

“I suppose it couldn’t hurt. It does rather feel like I’m trying to summon her spirit here. Do you know any good mediums?”

“If you stop running your mouth for five minutes I’ll give you a kiss when we get out of decontamination.”

Bliss grins. “You’ve fallen right into my trap, Miss Summer.”

***

The briefing room is tucked away at the aft of the Chrysalis near the Seraph hangars. Its earthen walls run thick with roots, as if hidden beneath the ground. Eight Hunters in black-and-white pilot suits huddle around the circular projection table at the centre, conspiratorial and bloodthirsty.

“We’ll shortly be arriving at the Mynah system,” says Captain Schwartz, her hologram pacing around the room. The star map projects an image of the galaxy: the Adamant and Protean quadrants marked out in navy blue and forest green, distant Regency territory in purple, the Cyst in the centre a virulent lime. With dizzying speed, the map zooms in on the border with the Adamant until the Mynah star system fills the room like a living orrery. Binary yellow suns, one barren rocky planet and two gas giants with a handful of moons; nothing out of the ordinary. “The pirate base here, hidden within the methane ocean on the moon designated Mynah III-d, has proven resistant to conventional attack. That’s why you’re here.”

Bliss resists the urge to fidget in her chair. Everyone here has already read the files; Schwartz only does this to feel like she’s in charge. There is no commanding a flight of Hunters when they scent blood. She understands the symbiotic relationship here: the Captain and her crew provide the necessary support to keep the flight’s human and Seraph bodies functioning, and the flight lays waste to all that might threaten the Chrysalis and Protean House’s interests. Nevertheless, it chafes. If she had it her way, she would not be dependent on orders and ground crews. Red Eris should fly free and unfettered.

“We’ll exit infraspace on the edge of the system here, where the last civilian distress calls were received,” the captain continues. A red line marks their entry into real-space beyond the furthest planetary orbit; for such a large ship, it is the only option. “One group will stay with the ship and handle the ambushing fleet, while the other group attacks their base directly.” A red dot marks the location of the base. “This is a time-sensitive operation as soon as we’re in-system; any ship that manages to escape will be a menace to our shipping lanes. Give them no quarter. Any questions?”

Kavia raises her hand, always too eager to get the first word in. “Who decides the deployments?”

“That will be up to your flight’s expertise,” says Schwartz. “The mission begins in thirty minutes. Your Seraphs await, Hunters.” Her hologram fuzzes and vanishes.

In matters of mediation, all eyes fall on Summer. She is feared, as an experienced Hunter should be, but she cares for the flight like a family. Every family needs a little poison to keep them in line. She stands up and addresses the flight: “Bliss and Hasret will accompany me on the base assault. We need our heaviest hitters to crack this shell. You too, Kavia; we’ll want your scouting talents.”

Diplomatic, as always. What Summer really wants is to keep an eye on Kavia after she abandoned them last time. Bliss knows the type; glory-seekers rarely last long as Hunters, and she’s as green as they come. Kavia’s Seraph is lightning offence and little else. If she stops bolting after prey like a cheetah after a gazelle, she might just survive her first year on deployment.

A rumble of agreement passes around the table. Summer is right, as always, and the meeting quickly comes to an end. Bliss squeezes Hasret’s hand as they get up to leave. “Good hunting.”

Hasret smiles queasily. The dark circles under her eyes are deeper despite her nap; the nightmares must be troubling her again. “See you on the other side.”

They part ways as they leave the briefing room, the heat of her touch lingering on Bliss’s skin. Anathema is restrained in the quarantine hangar; she cannot be allowed to contaminate the other Seraphs.

The familiar cheerful banter washes over Bliss as the flight preps for launch. Seven Seraphs, fierce and bestial, lurk under the boughs of the main hangar. They are nature, red in tooth and claw, steel-spined and thrumming with divine power. They are the weapons that build and shatter empires, but today is not such a momentous occasion. This is pest control. She can afford a little sport to wash her troubles away.

She slips into Red Eris like a favourite dress. Flesh laces up behind her as the cockpit seals her in, comfortable and warm. This space is all hers, the safest in the universe, her second body. If walls had ears they would be scandalised; more than one tryst has ended here, bodies pressed up against the wall, sweat trickling down flushed skin, tongues and fingers bringing out gasps and moans until they can take no more.

Not that she should be thinking about that right now. After the hunt, high on adrenaline with emotions surging through the bond, anything could happen. Hunter flights live and die on relationship drama. Sooner or later, they all love or hate each other.

Cradled in her harness, she calmly watches the chamber fill with green impact gel, barely registering when it displaces the air in her lungs. The conduits plug into her spine: four, three, two, one, action.

Red Eris spreads her wings, unsheathes her claws. Lovingly stitched together and regrown after the Nova Ball, she feels as good as new. Her claws are as sharp as ever; her arsenal of toxins and acids and autocannon rounds is newly replenished. The damage, the disgrace, persists only in her memory.

A shimmer passes over her vision; a momentary flash of dissociation. A reading in her vision tells her the obvious: the ship has entered real-space. Her mapping systems plot a gravity-assisted trajectory to the moon. The bond howls with concentrated bloodlust. The hangar door slides open; the Hunters launch one after another into open space.

Once more, Eris joins the hunt.

***

Sonic booms echo as the four Seraphs burst into the atmosphere. Ocean broken by the occasional island rushes past below them, barren and unwelcoming. The temperature is two hundred below, inhospitable to all but the hardiest life. Seraphs are made of sterner stuff; the heat of the spark suffuses Eris’s body, shields her precious pilot from the killing cold as it does in space.

There is only one environment in which a Seraph cannot thrive. Flying at her flank is one of the few who made it back: alive, but altered. Anathema is bound in writhing chains of vine and steel, swathed in bandages, bulging with lime-green pustules. When Eris looks at her directly, her vision fuzzes with static and the sound of faint atonal singing can be heard. She is unsure how many limbs or eyes the infected Seraph has. The number changes with each count. Anathema is unpinned from reality; not all of her made it back from the Festering Cyst. Not all of Hasret made it back, either.

Few things can truly scare Eris. Anathema is one of them. Hasret will never forgive herself for it.

At her other flank is Garden of Titania, Summer’s Seraph body. She looks every part the faerie queen: butterfly wings, armour of pink and gold petals, hair of vines streaming behind her. Just as a faerie should be, she is nature personified, capricious and brutal. An indispensable ally to have by one’s side.

-I’m going in. Garuda’s Wake, piloted by Kavia at the head of the pack, folds her feathered wings and dives into the methane ocean.

Intercepted comms chatter hums at the back of Eris’s mind. The Chrysalis’s arrival was met with some consternation; now the transmissions from the base spin into full-blown panic. The overlapping conversations amount to one message: “Scramble defence ships and get us out of here, right the fuck now. The Hunters are coming for us.”

Eris can’t resist a smile. They’re already too late.

As one, the three remaining Seraphs plunge into the dark ocean. Liquid methane, less dense than water, parts before their wings. Eris savours the cold on her carapace, shapes the current to dive faster. Her spark quickens as her sonar picks up signatures: half a dozen cruisers approaching rapidly, and the force-field bubble of the pirates’ base on the ocean floor.

Wordless, instinctive, Titania and Anathema launch into action beside her. With a flash of gold that penetrates the depths, briars shoot out from Titania’s arms, ensnaring the ships. Anathema raises an arm-cannon and fires a sweeping green stream of plasma, melting a salvo of incoming torpedoes and frying the ships’ force-fields.

Red Eris does what she does best. Lightning-fast, she corkscrews past torpedoes and sets upon the nearest ship with a vengeance. Her claws rip into field and hull both, metal screaming and buckling as she opens the cruiser like a tin can. She barely gets to see the crew rushing about inside before the sea consumes them.

The remaining ships fall quickly after that, Garuda’s Wake finishing them off with her cannon from a distance. Eris savours each and every one, listening in to the frenzied distress calls.

Why, then, does she feel so empty?

Inside the force-field dome, more ships are preparing to launch. The base is utilitarian, constructed from boxy prefab modules that could be found on any frontier world. Stolen, no doubt. Eris doesn’t much care about returning the property.

A transmission cuts across the chatter. A man’s voice, at a guess: “Face me, you cowards! You’ll pay for the lives you’ve taken!”

Well, Eris is hardly one to ignore a challenge, even one so utterly stupid. A hulking form emerges from one of the hangars: a clunky mechanical suit, clearly adapted from an Adamant heavy cargo-lifter, retrofitted with a missile battery and an energy sword. Compared to a Seraph, it is a child’s toy.

-I’ll be right back, she sends to the others.

She slips through the base’s field into its bubble of air and lands on the concrete in front of the suit, towering over it in her majesty. “Red Eris accepts your challenge, little boy.”

“You should know that you face the Scourge of the Perimeter. My name is—”

“I don’t much care. You don’t deserve to be remembered.” She takes a step forward. Nervous, quick with the trigger, the self-styled Scourge fires a volley of missiles at her. When the smoke clears, Eris is utterly unharmed.

Another step, and another. She breaks into a run. Her claws slide out and she severs one of the suit’s arms like cutting through tissue paper, the wound bubbling with acid. Her next strike is blocked by the energy sword; she wrenches it from the suit’s hand and throws it out of reach.

“I… I surrender!” The so-called Scourge looks down at the severed arm in panic.

This is no duel. This is pathetic. Where is these brigands’ resolve? She thinks of another time, another surrender. Valour was an opponent to be feared. Valour fought to the bitter end. Valour brought her millimetres from death.

She really can’t stop thinking about that woman. Now she has even tainted the joy of the hunt.

Dispassionately, she tears the suit in front of her limb from limb. It brings her no enjoyment whatsoever.

-Eris, you need to get out of there, says Anathema, her voice edged with static even through the bond. They’re bringing out something big, from under the surface.

The ground is rumbling beneath her feet. -Oh. I didn’t even notice.

-Back up. As far as you can. I can deal with this.

Titania cuts in. -You don’t have to—

-What is she doing? Garuda asks, an edge of fear in her voice.

-I can handle it, says Anathema.

-Don’t look at her, says Titania.

When Anathema tells her to move, she moves. Red Eris leaves the remains of the suit in the dust, dodging fire from gun batteries as she retreats a kilometre away.

Anathema floats in the lifeless ocean, mismatched wings spread wide, chains squirming in fear. The green pustules on her body glow brighter and brighter. -Pilot ID Hasret Gul. Authorise temporary release. Little by little, her chains begin to slip free.

Eris disables every sensor pointing in her direction. Even then, the dissonant singing is deafening, threatening to overwhelm her entirely. Static crawls across her remaining senses, and something else: words and letters, jumbled and chaotic. Next to the bubble, something is emerging: a ship as big as the Chrysalis, hidden under the ground. The pirate mothership.

For a split second, the sea fills with green light. Even from this distance, she feels the heat on her carapace, the blast of the explosion as the ocean evaporates around her. Pain radiates through the bond from Anathema, from Hasret locked inside.

When she can bear to look again, the base and the ship beside it are gone. Nothing remains in their place but a smoking crater.

She can see the sky, here at the bottom of the ocean. The liquid methane has evaporated for kilometres around. Even now the tide begins to rush in, but she spies a bone-winged silhouette hovering in the clouds, its form emaciated and asymmetrical, patched together from the Seraph dead.

-Vulture, she says.

The strange Seraph makes no attempt to hail them. It merely watches silently. The resonance of its spark is strange, sickening, like multiple Seraphs in one.

-Let’s get it, says Garuda. -It’s four on one; I’ll take point! She launches off from the group, beelining for the Vulture, but Titania shoots out a vine and holds her tight.

-Don’t you dare, says Titania. -Anathema is in no shape to fight, and they prey on the weak. You will not get any of us torn apart on my watch, rookie. Desperation creeps into her voice. This is personal.

-But— says Garuda.

-Listen for once in your life and stop, snaps Eris. -Chase prey that isn’t going to carve you up and eat your bones, and don’t abandon your flight-mates.

Distantly, as if half-asleep, Anathema speaks. Her chains snap tight, pinning even her arms to her sides. -They’re like me. Victims of the Archangel’s mistake. If they’re not doing any harm, leave them alone.

Garuda finally stops struggling in Titania’s grasp. Waves crash in around them as the ocean reasserts itself, and the Vulture vanishes from view.

When they crest the surface again, it is already gone.

***

In the hours past midnight, her cabin lights dimmed and Hasret snoring gently beside her, Bliss can’t let that feeling go. The hunt is not enough any more. So much blood was shed, and it was no challenge at all. She needs a real fight, an opponent worthy of Red Eris.

She needs a rematch.

Bliss slips out of bed, careful not to disturb Hasret. She looks so peaceful asleep, when the nightmares spare her. All the worry etched in her face seems to fall away at times like this. She deserves so much better, but this is the only option Protean House left open to her. Be a living weapon, or die. More than any of the others, Hasret is trapped in this life. At least Bear will live on through the recycling tanks when she dies, her memories left to guide future generations of Hunters. Hasret only has the scant years remaining to her. Bliss kisses her softly on the forehead, and goes to send a message she will almost certainly regret.

The communications rig Violette contacts her on is highly specialised, designed to hijack Adamant comms beacons when she is out of range of the Protean data network. Interstellar video calls are an unimaginable luxury, hogging precious bandwidth; these are the privileges of an Elder. She has no need of the video function right now. Text will be more than sufficient.

Contacting a member of an enemy House like this is an untenable risk on the ship’s ordinary comms relay. Her mother’s rig is encrypted and, in theory, untraceable. She enters the comms ID pulled from her Seraph’s memory of the duel. If this works, the signal will bounce between beacons until it finds wherever Inanna’s Vengeance is now.

She truly hopes it does. It would be horribly embarrassing to contact the wrong person by accident. The message is simple enough, but incendiary in its potential consequences.

Once it is typed out, she presses send. No going back now.

The message contains a date, a time and a set of stellar coordinates. I’m not done with you yet, Valour. Let’s settle this once and for all. -Lady B