Honor Among Thieves (The Honors #1)(98)
Bea didn’t answer. I glanced at her and saw she was silently crying, shaking with the force of it. Like me, she was battered by Nadim’s grief, but it was more than that. “The Honors,” she whispered. “Nobody could survive this.”
The scale of it silenced me, still. I thought about that beautiful silvery display of ships around Earth, glittering and shimmering in our yellow sun, welcoming young humans to the stars. I thought of the handsome, well-dressed Honors dancing at the ball. Then I thought about Tenty, an Honor too, a singer in the deep far from his home. A thousand civilizations, Nadim had said. Thousands of Honors, traveling the universe, hopeful and determined. Leviathan carrying them on.
How many lives had been snuffed out here? I couldn’t calculate. I couldn’t bear it.
Nadim was wailing. It was a low, discordant sound of anger, grief, and devastation. I felt it vibrating inside me until tears fell, when I hardly ever cried for anything that wasn’t my own pain. But there was so much here. Grief wasn’t a big enough word for this.
“Typhon,” I whispered, and turned my head toward Beatriz. “Is he dead too?”
Something flashed in the corner of my eye—not on the screen, but in the transparent window. I whipped around and saw an Elder, dark as an extinguished star, block out the distant binary suns an instant before his guns began to fire.
On us.
How the hell did he hide?
Even linked lightly with me, Nadim saw and reacted faster than I could have imagined. He twisted, flipped, and sped away, dodging pieces of dead ships with a precision that was born of desperation. We had one gun, but it would be suicidal to square off with such limited weaponry.
“Zara!” he shouted. “Dark run!”
I dropped into we, and together, we became the dark, drew it around us, vanished from the attacker’s senses. Zara fell away, and Zadim went deep, deeper than before, crushing depths of power and motion and senses and starsong cacophonous around us like a chorus of mourners at a funeral, screaming stars, everything warping at this speed into smears and moans because the other ship was fast, so fast, and though he couldn’t see us he fired in mercilessly accurate patterns at places we might be next.
We twisted again, curled, flashed like a speeding shark between the corpses of the ships. We were using them for cover, though the disrespect of it woke a sick, gray, discordant wave of horror in us . . . and, at the same time, we began to see flashes of thought from our attacker. Flashes of cold and hunger and blood raining silver in the dark.
Could this be Typhon? Has he gone mad? We both thought it, but the Elder was difficult to even glimpse. His song was all discordance and ruin and screams. We slipped and twisted through a blown-open corpse’s ribs, out another wound, reversed and glided under, then raced for the shelter of another dead body as the one where we hid shuddered under a wave of hits.
We had one single glimpse of the Elder, silhouetted clearly against a distant star.
It wasn’t Typhon.
Dead Leviathan shattered as the attacker’s guns fired on us. The dark run wasn’t working against whoever this Elder was; he was still tracking us somehow, and it was only the dead Leviathan shields that kept us alive. We darted behind a rolling, twisted tangle of skin and organs, something so purely horrific that even a glimpse of it made us both flinch, and gathered ourselves in one shimmering second. We have to fight.
We slammed against the next corpse and pushed it ahead, keeping it between us and the other Leviathan’s massive bulk. More fire poured down on us. Some got through as it chewed up soft tissue and spilled fragments in silvery waves.
Our bond suddenly tightened, drew the two of us together, and forged us into one bright, burning spark. Greater than both. Now.
We felt one shot graze our flank in a deep, ugly, ripping gouge. Felt the cooling rush of blood whispering out into the dark. We called to Beatriz, and she opened in frequencies and song, showing the way. Twist, rise, fall, twist, spin . . . We held on to the shelter of the dead Leviathan as long as we could and came up fast underneath the Elder’s lightly protected ventral side, the side that our starsinger showed to us.
We fired the cannon and felt the cold spread inside, energy drained away. Flesh seared and burned, turned to ash. The Elder’s surprise roared through us, over us, pain and shock and surprise, and he rolled.
Now. Now!
We hit full speed at the point where a barbed tail was bio-grafted to him, and ruptured the skin; it tore away and sent a froth of silvery blood spinning out into the void, mingling with the blood from so many others. It didn’t come cheap, this small victory; we sustained crushing injuries, and more wounds from his guns before we sped free, turning and arcing and twisting back.
He fired at us again but still couldn’t see us through the pain and Beatriz’s singing reflecting back at him. Couldn’t hear us. Couldn’t feel us.
We were tired, though. The dark run and firing the weapon had drained us fast, left us cold and clumsy.
Nadim pushed me free of the bond just as the last of it flickered away, and he was left exposed, an easy target in the glow of the suns. Beatriz had collapsed. No more song to baffle the Elder’s senses.
I staggered to the console and slapped the panel. Shields. Nadim shuddered and the power dropped still more—but the shield soaked the hit that could have broken him in two. But we didn’t have the power to absorb another of the Elder’s massive attacks. It gave Nadim time to wheel away from the onslaught, so instead of it annihilating us, we only took damage.