Without warning a thread of ruby-red light snaked down from the hide of the Spline. Where the starbreaker touched, buildings disintegrated, panels and beams flying high into the air. From the heart of the old Qax facility came a scream of tortured air, a soft concussion, a powerful, blood-red glow. The ground shuddered beneath their feet.

‘It has begun.’ She grabbed Symat and tried to pull him towards her flitter. ‘Symat, please. You were my cadre sibling; I don’t want to see you die. This isn’t worth a life.’

A blankness came into his eyes, and he pulled away from her. ‘Ah. Not your life, a pharaoh’s life, perhaps.’

‘I am not yet a pharaoh—’

He wasn’t listening. ‘You see what a dreadful, clever gift this is? A long life makes you malleable. But my pitiful life - a few decades at best - what is the use of such a life save to make a single, defiant gesture?’ He stepped away from her deliberately. He closed his eyes, and raised his arms into the air, robe flapping. ‘As for you - you must make your choice, Luru Parz.’

And from beneath Symat’s feet a bolt of dazzling light punched upwards, scattering debris and rock, and lancing into the heart of the Spline. There was a stink of meat, of corruption.

A shock wave billowed over her, peppering her with hot dust. Luru fell back in the rubble, stunned. Symat was gone, gone in an instant.

And the roof of flesh above her seemed to tip. The Spline sank with heavy gentleness towards the ground.

And she was going to be crushed beneath its monstrous belly. She turned and ran to her ship.

The flitter, saving itself, squirted towards the narrowing gap of daylight beneath that descending lid of flesh. Luru, bloody, bruised, filthy, cowered in her seat as immense pocks and warts fled above her head. A dark, steaming fluid gushed from the Spline’s tremendous wound; it splashed over the ground, a lake of blood brought from another star.

Suddenly she burst into daylight. From the air she could see how the raking starbreaker beam had left a gouge in the earth like an immense fingernail scratching a tabletop. But the gouge was terminated by the dying Spline, a deflating ball, already grounded.

The flitter, in utter silence, tipped back and lifted her up towards the edge of space.

The sky deepened to violet, and her racing heart slowed.