There was nothing for me to do but wait and trust them to come back.

I turned my hand palm-down so that the blood could drip onto the floor, small but sincere offering to the God Who Shed His Blood For Us. Let them come back, I prayed to the God of Kystrene. Let them come back. I have no more room for scars on my arm.

A crash across the room caught my attention and I looked up in time to see Tamara and Indigo burst through, looking slightly worse for the wear, but both upright and alive. “What are you doing?” Tamara demanded when she saw me. “Get back in that ship!”

I didn’t even bother to use the ladder. I just stepped off and let myself fall the six feet back to the floor of the Viper, landing hard and going immediately for the cockpit.

Tamara and Indigo landed behind me just as I roused the engines again. The light outside was so bright I couldn’t even see the background stars, and the side of the Nameless, even in shadow, was lit up clearly in all its rotten and scarred glory.

“We’re in, go!” Tamara shouted, and I gunned it, tearing carelessly free of the Nameless, because in a few minutes it wouldn’t matter anymore if part of the ship had lost atmosphere. The whole ship was about to be destroyed.

I felt a pang at the thought of all the things living on that ship, the tortured things Mara Zhu had made and abandoned. I couldn’t have saved them now, and if I had tried, they would have killed me for it. But it was hardly fair that they should be left behind to die. In my head and my heart, I offered a brief prayer for whatever souls they might have.

I had Tamara and Indigo, at least. “What happened?” I asked, as I tried to outrun a shockwave of light and superheated matter.

“I must’ve triggered something in the ship’s computer,” Indigo explained, terse. “Dreamer nanomachines started to appear. I sealed the room against them to finish broadcasting the data, but even after the broadcast was done, they were trying to get in.”

“Then they all just stopped,” Tamara seamlessly took up the narrative. “No cause that I could see. Maybe the sun fried the Dreamer.”

Or maybe my nanomachines had shut them down. “I’m glad you made it back,” I said.

“So are we,” Tamara said.

I glanced back once, as soon as the Viper had gathered enough speed to clear the stellar explosion. Where the Nameless once had been, I saw nothing but light.

CHAPTER EIGHTY EIGHT:

A Letter from the Dead

“It was a solid plan until I thought about it,” Tamara said.

“Well, I didn’t see you coming up with a better one,” I replied, annoyed.

There were seats on the Viper but somehow we’d all ended up sitting in a circle on the floor, crosslegged. The Viper didn’t need active piloting while it was in open space like this. I’d just set it on a vague course towards the Republic, because I’d known that, eventually, we would need food and fuel and other supplies. The Republic was less effectively policed than Maria Nova.