Mairead is pissed off that she's missing this battle, Leona thought. But we fly toward horror. Only a madwoman would envy us.
Space stretched on before them.
Leona's hands trembled around the controls.
She sucked in air.
Be strong. Be brave. Like Dad. You can do this.
The faces of the dead danced before her. Corpses floating through space. Emaciated bodies on the floor. Her wedding ablaze.
For Earth. For humanity. For my family. I will do this.
They kept flying through the darkness.
An hour passed, and signals blinked on their radar. Strikers were flying nearby, a hundred in formation. Far too many to fight, even if the entire Inheritor fleet were here. Yet the scorpion starships didn't acknowledge them. The strikers flew by, heading toward the border.
Leona exhaled in relief.
They see only deathcars leading humans to slaughter, she knew. A common sight for them.
She kept flying deeper, leading the other deathcars, plunging deeper into the empire. There was no up or down in space, but Leona imagined them descending into a pit, plunging down and down into darkness.
Another hour passed, and they saw more enemy ships. These strikers were larger—massive dreadnoughts that could dwarf even the Jerusalem. The largest were the size of skyscrapers, could hold thousands of scorpions, and their cannons were so large Leona could have flown her deathcar into the barrels. She counted five dreadnoughts and hundreds of smaller strikers. They too passed by the deathcars, rumbling on toward the border.
"They're mobilizing for war," Leona said. "Are they planning to invade the Concord?"
"Hard to say, lass," said Duncan. "But they're not moving this many warships for our sake. This is a force to conquer worlds."
Leona cringed. "Damn it."
Again, she wished her father were here. She desperately wanted to speak to him, to hear his wisdom. But she needed her own strength now. Her warriors depended on her. She must be as strong and wise as Emet, a leader they could rally around.
As they kept flying, they saw more and more scorpion ships, all emblazoned with the red stinger of the Skra-Shen empire. Some were warships, others starfighters. Some massive, square ships looked like troop carriers. As Leona flew, she took photographs of the enemy fleets. She had lost her data chip on The Human Solution, but here was new valuable intelligence. If the scorpions were truly planning an invasion, the Concord had to know.
Leona was no friend of the Concord. Both Concord and Hierarchy hated humans. Her loyalty was only to her people. Yet if a war between these two mighty alliances was truly brewing, Leona would choose sides. She would choose the Concord.
Both are evil, she thought. But the Hierarchy is worse. In Concord space, I'm an annoying pest, a mouse to be shooed away. But in the Hierarchy, we're all animals to be slaughtered. I cannot allow the Hierarchy to win.
Soon the ships of other species were flying by them. While the scorpions were the dominant race in the Hierarchy, sitting atop the pyramid, lesser civilizations thrived here too. Some ships were rusty and spiky, carrying the Bazurians—alien mosquitoes the size of wolves. Other ships were fleshy pods like giant wombs, carrying the Scolopendra Titaniae, giant centipedes that had attacked Earth two thousand years ago, that were now rising again. There were rocky ships, red spiral ships, ships that were long and flailing like metal snakes. The Hierarchy was mobilizing, and Leona shuddered.
In the game of civilizations, ours is but a small part, she thought. A great fire will soon burn. I pray that we can survive it.
They had flown for several hours when Leona saw it ahead.
A black, rocky world.
The gulock.
Leona wasn't sure who had invented the word gulock, a portmanteau of gulag and rock, but it fit. The world ahead looked like a frozen lump of stone, orbiting far from its small star. She saw no vegetation, only rocky plains, deep canyons, and black ice. There was no color here, only black and gray. No life had emerged here. No civilization would colonize such a world. But if you wanted to send somebody to hell, here was the place.
Hell is not hot, she thought. It must be frozen like this place.
"Our sensors are picking up a settlement near the equator," Duncan said.
"Not a settlement, Doc." She stared ahead, eyes narrowed, jaw tight. "A slaughterhouse."
The convoy of deathcars flew closer. Leona drew her telescope from her belt. She gazed at the slaughterhouse below.
A brick wall surrounded the complex, topped with spikes shaped like scorpion stingers. Round concrete huts spread in rows like soldiers. There were four guard towers, crude structures built of stone and soil like giant termite mounds. Larger domed buildings rose in the camp too, perhaps barracks or abattoirs.
And there were humans.
Leona inhaled sharply.
She saw them in a courtyard, a hundred or more. Naked. Some were walking, others crawling. They were holding pickaxes, chiseling at stones. A few scorpions stood guard.
The deathcar's control panel—a sphere embedded into the dashboard like an eye—shone and crackled.
"The gulock is hailing us," Duncan said.
Clicks and hisses emerged from a hidden speaker—scorpion language. Leona tossed her jacket over the translucent sphere, hiding her from view, and pulled out her translator. She held the electronic device to her ear. It picked up the clicks and hisses, translating them.
"Late as usual!" a scorpion was saying, speaking from the planet. "What the abyss happened to you? Your ships are dented and full of holes like the hive of a rotting drone queen!"
Leona spoke through the translator. Her voice emerged as clatters and clicks. "Rawdigger scum attacked us on the way. We destroyed them. Our video feed is broken, but the humans are still ripe for the harvest."
The gulock answered. "Bloody Rawdiggers! The traitors cannot be trusted. Land the humans in the port. Hurry up! We've got quotas to fill, damn it. Bring them down now or we'll blast you out of the sky."
Leona looked down. She could now see cannons extending from the guard towers, nasty surface-to-air guns. There were also several strikers parked at a spaceport.
I was definitely wise not to fly here with the Inheritor fleet, she thought.
"I'm bringing them down to harvest," Leona said.
The transmission died.
She looked at Duncan. "The scorpions are nasty buggers, but thankfully, they're not particularly bright."
"They make up for that with meanness," the doc replied. "Let's be careful down there."
"If I were careful, I'd have stayed home." Leona allowed herself a shaky smile. "The time for caution is over. It's time for bloodshed."
"You sound like your father," Duncan said. "At least when he was young and full of piss and poison."
Her smile widened. "I'm his girl."
As they entered the thin atmosphere, the deathcars rattled, and fire blazed around them. Soon they were flying through the dark sky, heading toward the camp. As Leona descended toward the port, she glimpsed a pile of skinned human bodies, red and dripping. The pile twitched, and she realized that some of the flayed humans were still alive, left to perish in the night.
She struggled not to gag.
No terror now. Right now focus on your mission.
"Sick bastards," Duncan said, clenching his massive fists.
"They'll pay, Doc," she said. "Get ready."
She flew toward the spaceport, a rocky field that lay within the camp's walls. Her deathcar thumped down by several strikers. A guard tower rose nearby, topped with cannons the size of oak trees. Scorpions stood atop the tower, and more scorpions crawled across the ground. The other deathcars landed behind Leona, raising clouds of dust.