Sealed into the appropriate fatigues Ono Red-2 spills out of the barracks and into corridors frantic with bodies and panic. Angelsteeth Base is on the move. Misery squeezes Lightning’s hand once before breaking the connection so they won’t impede the flood. The air heaves with electricity; every face they pass is tight-lipped and grim. Yet Misery sees determination in all the small signs: in the lines of Spider’s back, in the length of Tank’s stride, in the smooth silence from Ghost. It has been a week since Misery returned with the archangel mech; a week since she awakened to the truth. The time has come. Finally they will meet their destined foes through the medium of metal and aegis. It is not fear that governs them. It is hope.

They come to the fork in the path where they will have to split: the pilots to the Butchery, their captain and tech to the command center. Diamond squeezes Misery’s shoulder. “Let the Grace of the Forge go with you.” Tank is less prosaic: the girl pops her fingers and makes a crude, anatomically impossible suggestion that earns her an impatient knock on the clavicle from their captain. But it delights Misery. “Go with the Forge,” she says. The two peel from the pack and vanish in the human tides of emergency.

The system directs the pilots to the Butchery by the cleanest way it knows, avoiding logjams and long go-arounds. Ono Red-2 breaks into a sprint as the lanes clear up. In the cold bosom of the void their enemy approaches on burning thrusters, and every second wasted is a second closer to their arrival. The system parks a battle grid in their collective vision: there’s the Heretic triplet of Beggar, Tinker, and Sailor, a triangle of doom shuddering forward on the map. Behind them is something else, an enormous red dot, marked as an unknown by the system, but next to it a lozenge feeds in what the station exterior sees, and there, magnificent and terrible, is the shimmering black wedge of a Heretic destroyer. Bigger than the last one they sent. Was that incident only two months ago? Back when Misery first arrived on the station. Time is fake and elastic. Several lifetimes have passed since then. Her marrow sings with purpose: that destroyer is hers to take out. It has come to finish the job its smaller sibling failed, but it shall meet the same fate.

Then they’re in the Butchery, already, and the pilots split to their respective units. “Good luck out there,” Spider says. Misery and Lightning exchange one last look. They’ve talked about this moment. They know what to do.