Chapter 11

eleven

. . .

Katarina

The deck pitched beneath my feet, the shriek of rending metal drowning out the thunder of my pulse. Thaumas's talons bit into my palm, grounding me as the world shook itself apart.

"Kat!" He had to shout to be heard over the cacophony. "The armory! We need-"

A bone-rattling boom cut him off, the medbay door exploding inward in a hail of twisted shrapnel. Instinctively, I shoved Thaumas behind me, my body a living shield between him and the jagged metal.

Pain lanced through my shoulder as a shard found flesh, hot blood sheeting down my back. I gritted my teeth against a scream, the old litany echoing in my head.

Pain is nothing. Pain is weakness leaving the body. Pain is the forge that tempers a blade.

"Katarina!" Thaumas's agonized bellow, talons scrabbling at my wound. I shook him off, adrenaline and desperation a heady cocktail in my blood.

"I'm fine!" I snarled, scanning the smoke-choked ruin of the medbay. Somewhere beyond the twisted door, heavy footfalls and guttural voices heralded our attackers' approach. "We need to move, now!"

I grabbed his wrist, hauling him bodily from the bed. He grunted in pain but followed gamely, one arm wrapped around his seeping abdomen.

"The armory," he wheezed, lurching towards a side hatch. "Raza showed me a secret passage."

I didn't waste breath on questions. Just gripped his arm and ran, trusting his uncanny sense of direction.

The corridor was a strobing hell of emergency lights and shrilling alarms. Deck plates juddered beneath our boots as the Crimson Claw took another hammering blow, the bones of her shaking.

Somehow, impossibly, we made it to the armory intact. Thaumas keyed in his override with shaking fingers, the heavy blast door groaning open.

Inside was a treasure trove of death, rack upon rack of wicked blades and thrumming guns. With mechanical precision, Thaumas began pulling weapons, shoving them into my numb hands.

Pulse rifle. Plasma pistols. A bandolier of sticky grenades, the chemically sharp stink of the primers curdling my gut.

And knives, so many knives - wrist blades and push daggers and slim stilettos that disappeared up my sleeves like magic. When he was done, I jangled and clinked like an armory with legs.

"That should do for a start," he said grimly, shrugging into his own vest bristling with implements of death. "The others will be scrambling to repel boarders, but it'll be chaos out there. Our best bet is to rendezvous with Raza on the bridge, lock it down."

"And turn it into a killbox," I finished, my face hard. "Let the fuckers come to us, bleed them out through the chokepoints."

He met my eyes, a ghost of a smile curling around his beak. Even battered and bloodstained, he was so beautiful it made my hearts ache. "Have I mentioned lately how much I adore your ruthless tactical mind?"

I flashed him a fierce grin, checking the charge on my pulse rifle. "Flatterer. You just want me for my body count."

"Among other things." The heat in his amber gaze seared through me, stoking the embers in my core.

I leaned in to nip at his throat, relishing his shudder. "Rain check, bird boy. We've got some Syndicate ass to kick first."

"With pleasure," he growled, talons flexing on the stock of his sidearm. "Let's go show these soulless fucks the penalty for attacking our home."

We hit the first knot of boarders thirty meters from the bridge, a dozen void-suited figures exchanging fire with Raza's beleaguered defenders. The clamor of gunfire and screams was deafening in the confined space, harsh alien voices raised in challenge and agony.

I didn't hesitate. My pulse rifle bucked against my shoulder as I drilled the rearmost boarder, his helmet exploding in a spray of bone and brain. Beside me, Thaumas followed suit, his shots scything men down like wheat before the reaper.

Then we were on them, plasma blades sizzling to life in our hands. We fell on the shocked boarders like twin angels of death, all whirling talons and flashing steel.

The battle wore on bone against weary bone. Skills obtained in the training shone through as I sliced and diced, the sickening entrails and blood spewing everywhere.

I never lost track of Thaumas. Never let him out of my sight, an unbreakable tether binding us even in the chaos of battle.

He was magnificent, a raptor among lesser birds. Blood-flecked feathers mantled as he pivoted and lunged, plasma-casters spitting blue death. The boarders fell before him, charred and smoking, to lie twitching at his clawed feet.

And when his guns clicked empty, when the tide of bodies pressed too close for ranged weapons, his hands blurred, punch-blades leaping into his grasp like extensions of his own ruthless will.

He was poetry in motion, grace and savagery incarnate. My mate, my match, dealing death with a warrior's cold precision.

We shattered the enemy line, driving them back with relentless fury. Reinforcements flooded in behind us as Raza's men rallied, the tenor of the fight shifting inexorably in our favor.

But I didn't relent. Didn't dare slouch, even as the boarders broke and fled before our onslaught. This wasn't over, not by a long shot, no matter how decisively we dealt with these small fries.

Because I knew, with grim certainty, that this was just the first wave. The vanguard, the cannon fodder, thrown against our gates to test our strength.

The real horror, the true trial that would make or break us, was yet to come.

And come it did, with a klaxon scream that shook the Crimson Claw to her bones. I staggered, ears ringing, as an awful, wrenching sensation ripped through the ship.

Thaumas's eyes met mine, horror dawning like a bloody sun. "The port side engine pod," he croaked, dread and disbelief warring on his face. "They've kroxing breached it."

I swore, sulfurous and vile. The port side pod housed the Claw's hyperdrive, the miracle of engineering that allowed her to skip between star systems like a stone across a pond.

And if the boarders had reached that, punched through the ablative shielding and countless layers of adamantium, it could only mean one thing. One awful, impossible truth.

Zarath was here. The maestro of suffering himself, came to conduct this symphony of agony in person.

He would come for us now. His elite killers, his deadliest hounds, slavering for the kill. They would fall on us like a biblical plague, a tide of fang and claw and nightmare-made-flesh.

And we would have to break them. Shatter them like cheap ceramic, drown them in their own blood and viscera. If we wanted to live, to see another star rise, we would have to become the monsters we hunted.

I embraced it. Welcomed the fell certainty, the icy calm of a killer's resolve. My pulse rifle whined as I slapped a fresh cell into the receiver, the stock warm and solid against my cheek.

"So this is it," I said, my voice hollow in my own ears. "The kroxing endgame. We live or die, right here. On our terms."

Thaumas bared his fangs in a death's-head grin, talons flexing on the hilts of his blades. "No quarter," he growled, the Blood heat banking to an inferno behind his eyes. "No mercy. We paint the void with their agony."

A shout from ahead, Raza's voice raised in challenge and alarm. The harsh crack of a flechette gun, the meaty thunk of a body hitting the deck.

And striding through the smoke and ruin, over the twitching corpse of Raza's man, a figure straight out of a nightmare. Clad in blood-red silk, ceremonial void plate gleaming in the hellish light.

And a sleek, horned head I would know anywhere. Would see in my darkest dreams ‘til my dying day, smiling as he shattered my world to bloody shards.

Zarath. My former master, come to smile and destroy.

I raised my rifle with numb fingers as Thaumas stood to my side, a trembling lance of wrath in the howling dark.

The void takes us. The void kroxing takes us.

But we would not go gently. Would not let this smirking butcher snuff out our light, break our defiant hearts.

We would fight. ‘Til the last star guttered to ash, ‘til the bones of the ‘verse crumbled to dust.

We would fight.

So Zarath wanted a war? A reckoning paid in blood and flame and the screams of the dying?

I smiled. A rictus grin, my lips peeled back from teeth sharp as scalpels.

We'd fucking give him one.

I squeezed the trigger, a scream of hate and promised hell tearing from my throat. Thaumas roared his challenge beside me, anguish and fury like a force of nature.

And in the heartbeat before the world dissolved into fire and shrieking death. I glimpsed Zarath's face through my gunsight.

Saw his smile widen to an abyss, dark glee kindling in his rotten eyes. As if he welcomed my hatred, reveled in the twisted symmetry of this moment.

Then the mag clicked empty, the bolt cycling on searing air and blood-mist. And in the sudden silence, broken only by the drip of fluids and the groans of the maimed.

Zarath laughed. A rich, cultured sound, brimming with obscene satisfaction.

"Oh, my dear, dear little bird," he purred, silk and razors. "How I've missed you."

He stepped over Raza's twitching form, gore squelching beneath immaculate boots. His elite guards fanned out behind him, living shadows bristling with cruel edges.

I emptied my lungs in one shuddering exhale. Felt the ice-water calm of a killer settle over me, slow and inexorable as a glacier.

So this was how it ended. In fire and blood and the mocking laughter of tyrants.

So be it.

I met Thaumas's eyes, my heart in my throat. In the fractured amber of his gaze, I saw my resolve, my diamond-hard defiance.

No words. No pithy I-love-you's or choked endearments. We were beyond such thin comforts in this eleventh hour.

Instead, I quirked a brow. Cocked my head towards the advancing monsters, a clear question in the angle of my jaw.

Together?

His smile was a blade, bright and vicious and hungry. His hand found mine, rough and strong, the most perfect fit.

Together.

As one, we stepped forward. Wreathed in the lightning of our bond, cloaked in the chill purity of our purpose.

Monsters to slay monsters. Hounds to rend the throats of jackals.

In all the long annals of the Obsidian Sodality, I wondered if anyone had ever chronicled this. This shining, doomed defiance, spitting in the face of powers and principalities.

I doubted it. But if we were to be the first.

If we were to cut our swath to glory and graves at the edge of this abyss.

By the old gods and the new, we would make a kroxing legend of it.

"Well, darling?" I said lightly, my voice echoing strangely in the clotted air. "Shall we dance?"

"Let's," Thaumas purred. "And damned be any who try to cut in."

As one, we raised our weapons. Sank into perfect fighting crouches, muscles singing with lethal potential.

And charged, screaming, into the jaws of our fate.

Into legend, borne on blades and fury.

Into the mouth of hell itself.

And for one shining instant, the ‘verse itself seemed to hold its breath. Seemed to tremble before the coming onslaught, the reckoning writ in blood and starlight.

And then we hit them, two lances of fang and flame.

And the whole universe shattered, screaming, into oblivion.