Women's Sewage, The Citadel, Jin Syue, Northern Venus

  The encrypted channel hissed with background noise, along with strings from the ballroom above filtering through layers of stone and steel.

  Diego's relay crackled twice against Xin's wrist. "Si, amigo?"

  "Diego, it's Xin. We've hit a wall. Sigrun needs to come down. Women's restroom, eastern corridor, third floor."

  A pause. Then Diego's voice: "Entendido. Relaying now."

  "Thanks." Xin cut the channel and sat down against the tunnel wall.

  The stone was warm from the geothermal pipes running behind it. He set Jade across his thighs and checked the magazine. The corridor smelled like gun smoke and copper and the faint blankness of the dead Blood Swallow cooling five meters away.

  Roach stood watch at the junction, arms folded, back straight. Silent.

  H?kon slid into Xin's lap. He drew abstract shapes on the tunnel floor with one claw, his scales restless. Amber to brown and back. "Sky Lady coming?"

  "Yup. She's coming."

  "Soon-soon?"

  "Soon, buddy."

  H?kon considered this. Drew another shape. "Pappa scared?"

  Xin looked down at him. Those luminous blue eyes watching, too knowing for a three-year-old Diabolisk the size of a coffee mug. Xin's glasses were fogging from the tunnel humidity. His hands still hadn't stopped shaking.

  "A little," he admitted.

  H?kon pressed his head against Xin's chest, right over his heart.

  "HAW-koon scared too." A small chirp. "But Red-Eye Man strong. Sky Lady strong. She come, then bad doll ladies go away."

  From the junction, Roach's voice came low and dry. "Kid's got more faith than I do."

  "He usually does," Xin said.

  Minutes stretched. Somewhere above them, Sigrun was dancing with a prince, smiling while hands went where they shouldn't, so every eye in the room stayed on her and none noticed the skinny ex-Rigger and his pet lizard slipping out the back.

  "Come on, Sigrun. Come on."

  She dropped through the maintenance hatch like she'd been born in tunnels.

  The cobalt hanfu was smudged at the knees where she'd climbed. The high collar had been torn open, two stitches ripped free for breathing room, silk fraying at the edges. Her blonde hair had come half loose from whatever it had been pinned into, and her icy-blue eyes swept the corridor in a single pass.

  Dead Blood Swallow. Xin against the wall with a 10mm in his lap and a Diabolisk in his arms. Roach at the junction with his jaw set and his hands clean.

  "Roach?"

  He handed her the toolbox. She opened it, lifted Skuld in brick form, and expanded it. The white Breacher Shotgun unfolded with mechanical clicks that Xin found satisfying.

  She racked it once. The sound bounced off the tunnel walls. "How many more?"

  "At least a dozen between us and the Terminal," Roach said. "Patrols of two, maybe three."

  Dilinur's voice cut into the channel. Low, controlled. "The prince appears unaware, but Ming is watching the corridors. She's noticed Sigrun's absence. Jabari is covering, but you have limited time. Marcus is holding position at the ballroom's edge."

  "Understood." Sigrun checked Skuld's cascade chamber. Buckshot loaded, breaching rounds in reserve. She looked at Roach. "We'll handle it. Do whatever you need to stall the people upstairs."

  Roach hesitated. One second. But his cover was their exit. If he was blown down here, they weren't getting out.

  "Better stay alive," he said to Sigrun. Then to Xin, with something close to a smile buried under all that gravel: "Watch your girl's back."

  He disappeared up the tunnel. His footsteps faded.

  Sigrun looked at Xin. Xin looked at Sigrun. The cobalt silk was torn and her knuckles were red.

  H?kon chirped from Xin's shoulder. "Sky Lady. Bad doll ladies here. Many-many."

  "I heard." She reached over and adjusted H?kon's position on Xin's shoulder, the way one would fix a child's collar on the way out the door. Her fingertips brushed Xin's neck for half a second and then she was all business again, Skuld braced against her hip, eyes on the corridor ahead. "Stay behind me. Both of you."

  "Yup." Xin held Jade with both hands.

  The first pair of Blood Swallows came around a bend twenty meters ahead.

  They saw Sigrun, saw Skuld, and split apart. Twin dark-eyed faces, identical crimson-and-ebony armor, Zephyrium Daggers clearing their sheaths in the same breath. One went high against the left wall, the other dropped low along the right. Practiced. Synchronized. The same nervous system template running the same combat script.

  The one on the left spoke first. Her voice carried that same flat, recited quality.

  "The Master teaches: 'Obedience is woman's highest virtue. Let her hands find purpose in submission, and her silence become her offering.'"

  Sigrun rounded the corner and fired.

  The cascade chamber rotated with a heavy mechanical chunk. The high Swallow caught buckshot across her chest plate and slammed into the wall, daggers scraping stone as she slid. The low one kept coming, closing the gap in two strides, blades aimed at Sigrun's hamstrings.

  Xin fired Jade from behind Sigrun's hip. No neural link, no green reticle, just the iron sights and his shaking hands. First shot went wide. The second clipped the low Swallow's shoulder guard, enough to make her stumble.

  Sigrun reversed Skuld and drove the stock into the stumbling Swallow's jaw. Bone cracked. The Swallow reeled, and Sigrun put a round through her at close range.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  The other was back up. Shoulder armor dented, blood on her lips. She came fast, both daggers working in tight arcs, and one caught Sigrun's forearm. Shallow, but the cobalt silk split and blood bloomed through.

  Sigrun caught the follow-up strike on Skuld's barrel, sparks showering off the white composite. She stepped inside the Swallow's reach and fired point-blank. The cascade chamber roared and the Swallow went down.

  Two dead. Sigrun was breathing hard. blood trickling from her forearm.

  She pulled a Medi-Vap vial from inside her hanfu and pressed it to her lips. The hiss of the vaporizer. The mint-and-metal smell as nanobots went to work. She held the breath, exhaled slowly, and Xin watched the wound's edges close.

  "Xin." Her Nordic blue eyes found his. "These wards. Can you do anything?"

  He'd been thinking about it since three corridors back.

  The device was bolted to the tunnel wall at the last junction they'd passed. Copper housing, Imperium manufacture, about the size of a shoebox. A blue indicator light pulsed on its face.

  Xin crouched in front of it while Sigrun stood watch, Skuld trained on the darkness ahead. H?kon perched on the pipe above, tail curled, watching Xin's hands.

  The Nucleus Watch interfaced with the node's local broadcast signature. Imperial military standard encryption, layered and redundant. The ward network was distributed. Killing one node wouldn't collapse the whole system, but it would create a localized gap. A bubble of maybe forty meters where psionic abilities could function.

  Forty meters. Enough.

  "We're lucky. The firmware hasn't been updated since installation," Xin murmured, fingers flying across his Watch interface. Lines of code scrolled across the small display, reflected in his glasses. "2217. They installed it and forgot about it. Security through obscurity."

  "Can you break it?"

  "Can suppress this node temporarily. Maybe ten minutes before the network compensates—reroutes through adjacent emitters—"

  "Do it."

  "Yep." His I:8 against encryption that hadn't seen a patch in nearly a century. The node's handshake protocol was rigid, but a Rigger whose career had been built on making machines do things they didn't want to do was something else entirely.

  He found the frequency modulation layer. Peeled it back. Found the core suppression algorithm underneath.

  "There—" Xin pushed a null frequency into the modulation stack. The node's output stuttered. The hum wavered, pitched down, and died.

  H?kon gasped.

  His scales flooded sapphire blue in a wave that started at his snout and rolled down to the tip of his tail. Clean frost crystallized along his spine, tiny ice particles forming in the humid tunnel air and drifting from his body like snow. His talons extended. His eyes went bright, bright blue, and a sound came from his throat that was half chirp and half laugh.

  "Pappa! HAW-koon feel again!"

  Sigrun rolled her shoulders. Something woke behind her icy-blue eyes. The Lunar attunement stirring, like a dormant energy was flooding back into her muscles.

  She flexed her right hand. Quantum blue energies crackled across her knuckles. Thin. Controlled.

  Xin felt it too. Faint, given his modest Void affinity, but present. The familiar hum of Aether in his blood, the neural link in his glasses stirring from its forced sleep. He raised Jade, closed his eyes for a breath, and whispered. "Bheda Atisīmā. [Pierce Beyond."

  The Void spell was small. A thread of green light ran from his fingertips along Jade's polymer frame, sinking into the mini computer beneath the barrel. The neural link snapped fully online, feeding targeting data through his glasses. The green reticle appeared, hovering at the center of his vision. Jade's heat-sink ridges glowed faintly as the processor hummed to life.

  87% accuracy improvement. The numbers from a spec sheet he'd memorized three years ago, back when he assembled the gun from surplus parts at ZenFu DS.

  His hands still shook. But the reticle compensated. That was the whole point.

  "Ten minutes," Xin said, setting a countdown on his Watch. "Clock's running."

  Sigrun's mouth curved. Thin. Sharp. All teeth. "Plenty."

  The corridor opened into a maintenance hub where four tunnel systems converged before the archive wing's entrance. High ceiling, maybe five meters. Decommissioned equipment lining the walls. Overhead pipes thick as Xin's torso, sweating condensation into puddles across the stone floor.

  Four Blood Swallows were stationed inside.

  They'd heard the gunfire. They were waiting.

  Four in staggered formation, daggers drawn, dark eyes fixed on the tunnel mouth. Identical faces. Identical crimson-and-ebony armor. Identical silence.

  The nearest one spoke. Her voice echoed off the pipes, carrying that hollow, memorized cadence. "The Master teaches: 'When a woman is empty, it may be filled with the Dragon's will. Rejoice, for you have been chosen to be emptied.'"

  Sigrun came through the entrance and didn't slow down.

  Skuld spoke first. The shot hit the nearest Swallow before she could close, buckshot punching through her chest plate. She went down. The second Swallow dodged left, boots finding footing between puddles, daggers low.

  Sigrun's free hand came up. Her palm opened.

  "Frost, bylgja!"

  The Lunar spell tore from her hand in a wave of pale blue that hit the floor and spread. Ice bloomed across the stone in crackling sheets, turning the puddles to a skating rink. The Swallows' precise footwork turned to chaos. One went down on a knee. Another caught herself on a pipe and lost a dagger doing it.

  H?kon stood on Xin's shoulder with his jaw wide, and the J?turmál came out of him on instinct, high and reedy: "K?ld Keila!"

  A cone of frost sprayed from his open mouth and caught the nearest Swallow full in the face. His cold cone couldn't kill, but the frost slowed and numbed. It made fingers clumsy and daggers hard to grip.

  The Swallow wiped ice crystals from her eyes and swung at them. Xin dodged, H?kon gripping his shirt as he circled back.

  Then Xin fired Jade from the tunnel entrance, painted the green reticle. The neural link tracked the stumbling Swallow and the round caught her in the hip. She buckled. His second shot hit her ribs. She fell.

  "The pipes here are cooler. Safe for touching." Xin looked at his Nucleus Watch to verify before turning to H?kon. "Buddy. Go above?"

  "HAW-koon help!" H?kon launched upwards, leaping and grabbing one of the pipes near the ceiling.

  The remaining two Swallows converged on Sigrun.

  One came high with both daggers. The other flanked left. Sigrun met the high one with Skuld's stock, a lateral sweep that met the woman's jaw, and in the same motion brought her left hand around, fingers splayed.

  "Tungl, slá!"

  Silver lightning arced from her palm in a jagged bolt of blue-white that struck the flanking Swallow in the chest. The crack of it was sharp enough to make Xin's ears ring, and the impact sent the Swallow into an equipment bank hard enough to dent the metal casing. Ash formed across her armor where the lightning had struck, and she didn't get up.

  The last Swallow was still fighting. The one Sigrun had staggered but stayed upright, dagger coming around low, scoring a line across Sigrun's thigh through the cobalt silk.

  H?kon's scales blazed vivid sapphire. His tiny talons flared, and he threw himself off the pipe above, all four limbs spread. A J?turmál word that came from his throat was something that Xin hadn't heard before.

  "HRíMSKRíK!"

  The lunar frost enchanted shriek hit the Swallow like a wall of frozen air. Not enough to hurt, but enough to blind and force her eyelashes shut and coat her daggers in a rime of white ice that made them slip from her fingers.

  "Master—guide me—!" She groped for the fallen blades.

  Sigrun put a round through her chest. Skuld's cascade chamber cycled once and the hub went quiet.

  Four Blood Swallows lay across the floor, still and silent.

  Sigrun stood in the center. Breathing hard. Silk torn in three places: forearm, thigh, shoulder. Blood on her hands, most of it the Swallows'. But the hanfu certainly needed repairs.

  H?kon landed on Xin's outstretched arm, panting, scales cycling from battle-blue to turquoise. His tail swished. His little chest heaved. "HAW-koon brave, Pappa?"

  "You were very brave, buddy." Xin's voice was shaking. His hands were shaking. But H?kon was alive and Sigrun was alive and the chamber was quiet.

  He reached into his pant's pocket and pulled out a small blue vial. Indra-Sprite. He'd stashed it before they left Camp Yusuf, because Nikki always said a psion without a top-up was a psion asking to pass out.

  He cracked the seal, took a small sip, felt the warmth bloom in his chest as Aether steadied in his blood. Then he tilted the vial toward H?kon. "Here, buddy."

  H?kon sniffed the rim. His scales shifted to curious beige, then brightened to azure. He lapped at the liquid with his tiny tongue, once, twice, three times. His eyes went wide. "Yummy blue juice."

  "Just a little," Xin said, pulling the vial back. "Don't want you bouncing off the walls."

  H?kon's scales shimmered a content turquoise, and he settled onto Xin's shoulder with a satisfied chirp.

  "Seven minutes left," Xin said, checking the ward timer on his Watch. "And if intel holds true—the Tianshu Terminal's up ahead."

  Ahead: a heavy door, sealed with copper-inlaid locks and a security panel that blinked amber in the haze. The entrance to the antechamber.

  Sigrun wiped blood off Skuld's stock with the hem of her damaged hanfu. She looked at the door, then racked the shotgun.

  "Let's go say hello."