There’s no way Andrade could’ve promised them anything more than death, but the flood will drown us all if we give it the time, one way or the other. When the Demiurge hit, Horizon’s crew made a mistake: they tried to survive, to run and hide and lose themselves in all the chaos. They hesitated, and it nearly doomed them. Andrade has asked them all to die today, and the hollows can’t kill them fast enough.

Ask any jockey how they’d like to go, and they’ll tell you. They’ll start with their nightmares, but they always do. They’re afraid of being lost at sea, and the fear goes deep. They know that there’s every chance that they’ll be trapped in the ruin of their machine, forced to watch their O2 slowly count down to nothing. That it might be a year before someone finds their frozen mummy; a decade maybe, maybe more. There’s a chance that the last human being might pass from memory, and they’d still be out there in the dark.

They’ll say that they want it on their own terms, hot and loud if possible. Out on the wind, and torn apart in sparks and tungsten-silver. Killed instantly by hypervelocity shot, incinerated as embers find their air supply and follow it down their throats. They’ll tell you that they hope their reactor cracks before they do, and that they’ll die between one heartbeat and the next, consumed in starlight.

You can see it in the way they fight. Too hard and too fast, reactors overloaded and warheads live in their tubes. Nothing is more dangerous than a convict in a corner, ready to be the first one to bleed, to tear your throat out with their teeth if that’s what it costs.

Don’t let the hollows touch you. If they do, you tear those fingers off. You break the arm behind it, use mass and steel to crack the shoulder that holds the arm. You lock yourself to them, and pull every safeguard you can reach. Set yourself ablaze, and make sure they follow you into ash and cinders.

We keep below the fire, following crags and cracks and gulleys and all the air they’ve bought for us. We make for where Horizon’s networks have always run thickest—the end of nearly every circuit and connection, coiled around the closest thing the ancient ship has to a mind.

Tower.

Thirty-Three

THIRTY-THREE

WE FALL FROM the sky, following a long arc back to Horizon. The Cluster takes us over a tangle of wrecked hull and shattered strike-faces—over the mess where the main guns of the Demiurge fired their last. We trace the path of gigantic munitions—shots made for cracking continents, hurled into Horizon’s upper decks—to where Tower used to be.