So Misery does. Down the corridor, a safe sprint away, stands a door bright-fenced by an aegis. Holy obsidian bracketing its frame. Misery reaches in. Wakes the stone. Pulls at the aegis until it expands and breaks, lashing out, dissolving wall and structure, lancing into the panels on the floor, which crumble like clay leached of all moisture. Through the gaping wound, sparking and hissing fluid, Misery sees more doors, more walls, more targets to eat through. She reaches out, the borders of her awareness growing, and pillows of holy obsidian light up across Monkglass’s structure. Hers to manipulate. Hers to command. Again and again she bursts the bubbles of aegises and carves wormholes through the guts of Monkglass. Screams, destruction, the acrid punch of ozone. Just blips in the limitless velvet of her consciousness. She expands like a sun’s corona, like a supernova’s shock wave, and the more she cuts into Monkglass the more of it she feels and sees, until the station is a mere trinket in her grasp, a pearl against the oyster-flesh of her tongue. She closes her teeth as she wins access to the hangar where the other half of her lies imprisoned. A long way down for the frail human body, but nothing to an avatar of God, and Monkglass’s gravity is stone-made and stone-maintained.

Lightning walks to the edge of the pit she’s carved and peers down. “Long fucking fall,” she says.

“I’m good at those.” She strides toward her lover, the might of the cosmos in her every step. Opens her palm. “Hold on to me.”

She sees in Lightning a blossoming of ecstasy, a lotus flower unfurling. Then they’re plunging, hand in hand, off the serrated edge she’s made, the gravity around them failing as Misery shuts it off. They’re falling, and then they’re floating, and below them their units wait for them, mouths open like baby birds.

Here’s how the battle breaks down:

The archangel Misery bursts from the pulp of Monkglass into a universe in action, consumed by chaos. The Heretic siegeships, alerted to the threat of the violent intruders, are on the move. A mortal observer might see nothing, just points of light arcing faster than usual across the vast distances of space, but the archangel Misery knows better. Zie perceives the cosmos with the clarity of the Forge, a distributed omnipotence that works in force and pattern, without thought and without language. The siegeships have broken their net, and all of them sluice, piscine, toward a focal point. Their determination elucidates their purpose. They are forming a shield.

At the center of their efforts, an unfamiliar shape lurks in the folds of an inverse aegis. An enormous cabochon of synthetic holystone, finned and white like the legend of Leviathan from Old Earth, hunted by the great demon Ahab. The Edgeless Blade, Esse Temple’s ship. The thing they have come to destroy.