Date: August 29, 2026
The screens went first. Every monitor in Siddhartha’s Peace — office terminals, market displays, the flickering panels bolted to the sides of the tide generators — filled at once with the flame and the spear, and a voice that had been human once began screaming into the thin night air that the prophet had come, and would not stop saying it. Then the colony office erupted, and the crew sat in their shuttle on the landing field and felt the hull rock with the shock of it.
Bennett II went out first. He rolled under the chain-link gate and moved through the streets toward the gunfire, past shuttered windows and doors barred from the inside, past people who had decided that whatever was happening tonight was better survived indoors. He found Franco and Sasha in an alley with their infant, backed against a wall by two figures in monk’s robes with their heads shaved and the flame and spear tattooed across their scalps, stun batons sparking in their hands. Purification time has come, one of them was saying. Come with us. The great Bishamonten will raise us from the flames, and we will be born anew. Then they heard him, and turned, and looked at the android standing in the mouth of the alley, and their faces changed. It is one of the great apostasies. The artificial mind in physical form.
They came at him together, which was a mistake. Bennett threw open his poncho, brought the smart rifle up, lined the two of them into a single narrow window, and fired once. Both heads came apart. The bodies stood there a moment before they fell. Sasha screamed and covered her eyes; Franco stared through the wall at nothing until he could move again, and then he took his family and ran down a side street. When the rest of the crew arrived they found two headless converts and a great deal of blood, and Bennett standing over them, dipping his fingers in it and drawing it across the smooth blank plate where his eyes should have been.
The dead were nobody. Their colony identification said one had been an oxygen farmer and the other a sanitation worker — ordinary people who had gone to work that week and gone out into the street that night to make converts. The crew took the stun batons and the sanitation worker’s badge, in case a locked door came up later, and listened to a speech rolling up from the colony office too far away to make out, punctuated by the roar of a crowd agreeing with it.
They ran Franco down before he could disappear. Dax hit the apartment door at a sprint and felt his shoulder pop as it gave way, and the family went sprawling on the floor inside. We just wanted to be safe, Franco said, with the baby starting to cry behind him. I knew something like this was going to happen. It just felt off. And Sasha, gathering a bag: I’ve never trusted the leaders of this place. One failure after another. This place had such promise — a place away from corporate greed, corporate control — and it fell victim to it all the same. Dax stood up out of the wreck of the door, holding his shoulder, and told them he was there to collect their fare. Four thousand credits changed hands, two for each adult and two more for the child, along with the observation that they were taking food out of a child’s mouth. Marge walked them toward the landing field.
The torches came next, a column of them moving out of the valley toward the landing field and the space elevator standing over it. Bennett broke into the colony PA and spoke to the crowd in the voice of their god, telling them to abandon the ships and go instead to the place where the trees were kept. The column stopped. Wavered. Split. Half of it turned toward the Agrodome and the apple saplings the crew had delivered that same afternoon, and the rest kept coming.
From the shuttle, Carl watched a small group arrive at the fence and open the gate with a badge, as casually as a man going to work. Ensho was at the front of it, the smiling trader the Abbot had marched off to arrest, with three men and their stun batons at his back. Behind them, being prodded along and very plainly not going willingly, were Abbot Ben Shirayuki in his gaudy robes and a stranger in a corporate jumpsuit with STRAYLIGHT COMPUTING stitched down the side. The elevator lit from the base upward. The doors closed on all of them, and the capsule began to climb.
Franco’s family reached the ship a few minutes later and complained about the accommodations. Carl gave them a mylar sheet and a chocolate ration and told them it was worth their lives, which Sasha accepted with the expression of a woman who had once flown better.
The colony office, when the rest of the crew got to it through the back alleys, was a siege. Cultists were dug in behind barricades they had thrown up in the street, firing into a smoking building with a hole blown in its side — and they had real weapons, shotguns and a pulse rifle, on a planet where, that same morning, exactly one man had carried a gun. Somebody had gotten to a fabricator. Somebody had been stockpiling.
Dax walked out to talk to them with his shotgun on his shoulder, and got as far as hey, boys before a chirp sounded from the second floor and an automated turret raked him across the street, shattering his armor plate and putting rounds through him. He dove for the barricade and landed among the cultists, who immediately put every weapon they had on him. When Bennett tried to kill the gun, a counter-shot came out of an upper window and blew a cinder block apart behind his head.
So he took the gun instead. He found his way into it through the colony’s network and discovered the security credentials that had armed it belonged to Tenka, and then he told the turret, patiently, which of the people in the street below were friends and which were not.
After that it was noise. Marge put suppressing fire into the barricades and Jon worked the street with his SMG. Arnold Wilkerson chose that moment to charge across open ground with a nail gun and caught a burst before Bennett could cut the turret off him — a bone snapped in his left arm, he spun with it, and he kept running and nailed a man to the barricade anyway. Then he tried to lift a cultist up as a shield, and the man — an agrodome laborer, all shoulders — simply turned him around and used him as one instead.
The big one came out of the barricade line with his hood back, shaved head, a long scar down the side of his face, and got both hands around Arnold’s skull. The great Bishamonten will reward me for killing you. Dax hit all three of them at a dead run and put them on the ground. Bennett came across the street almost too fast to follow and drop-kicked the man in the chest; the brute caught Dax’s shotgun out of the air, then caught Bennett by both feet and threw him into the perimeter fence. Something snapped along the android’s spine. He got up walking wrong, with sparks coming off his back.
Carl put the dropship over them at rooftop height with the floodlights blazing, and cultists at the outer barricades hit the deck, and Odo’s voice came up on the radio from inside the building begging for help, and Tenka’s came after it, ragged and slowing: I tried to set up a perimeter. I don’t know where these bastards got the weapons. They must have been stashing them somewhere. I got the turret up in time — but it’s only got so many rounds.
The ship came down with its ramp open. Carl leaned out of it and put a revolver round through the big man’s leg, and as he went over Dax landed on his chest and drove a knife into his heart. He gasped once. This thought raised me, he said, and died, and Dax leaned close to his ear and told him where they’d meet again.
They named the dropship that night, between one wave and the next: the Hot ‘n Ready, with a promise of nose art to follow. Marge set Arnold’s arm badly enough that everyone heard about it and splinted it anyway. Dax took the dead man’s shotgun and every shell he was carrying.
Inside the colony office there were monks sitting in the hallways with their hands over their ears. Odo came out of the communications room asking whether they should fight or run, and admitting he had no idea how to do either. Dax took him by the robe and told him to start moving the wounded onto the ship, and that they would be discussing payment shortly. First Instructor Fugen found them on the roof, formal robes, headdress, none of the Abbot’s gaudiness, and demanded that they go and get the Abbot back.
The turret sat on a conference table on the second floor, in a room with the windows blown out and a decorative Zen garden of steel balls sitting untouched among the bullet holes. They reloaded it. A grenade came through the breach and Dax got to it and shoveled it back out the window, and two more of the faithful died in the street. Marge found Tenka in the Abbot’s office, lying on his back and shooting out the window with blood running through the bandages on his side, and dragged him out on her shoulder using his own rifle as a crutch, cracking his head on the entryway on the way in. Just leave me next time.
Arnold and Carl fought the landing gear into something that would hold; Arnold welded it solid and melted the control lines doing it, Jon caught the mistake, and Carl fixed it by tearing out the wiring for the ship’s exterior lights. Bennett went through Tenka’s office and came back with three rounds of smart-rifle ammunition from under a stack of very old magazines. They took the crates of turret ammunition with them, not because they wanted them but so that nobody else could have them, and left the gun itself behind, still firing into the dark, cutting the faithful to ribbons as they advanced across open ground.
They lifted off the roof with roughly twenty people aboard and small-arms fire coming up at them. A missile tracked them out of the streets and hit a stabilizer, and everyone not strapped down went into a bulkhead, and the baby screamed, and the Hot ‘n Ready limped into orbit trailing smoke.
The Second Chance was waiting where they’d left her, with the salvage bay standing open, which nobody thought hard enough about. Dixie Doss came up on the radio to welcome them home and tell them everything was fine.
They were all off the ship and standing in the shuttle bay when Jon felt the barrel touch the back of his head. That’ll be far enough, Captain. I think you may have some cargo we are owed. A woman with three scars laid over eyes that glowed a dull pink sat on a cargo container with a rifle across her knees — Mara Thrall, who her own crew called Three Cut. Dixie stood in the doorway with a gun at her neck and told them she was sorry, that she’d tried, that she just didn’t want to die. Etna Sola stood beside her with another. And the man doing the talking had no lower jaw at all — the whole bottom of his skull replaced by a cybernetic assembly gone rusty and cheap, his voice coming out of it thin and tinned. Captain Vane Kross. His people called him Rusty, and he did not appear to mind.
They were the Iron Cross: the ship the crew had lied to on the way in, the one that had peeled off toward a moon and gone quiet. It had been sitting alongside all along with its power dead, one more piece of floating junk. Their boarding pod had come in through the open salvage bay while the crew was down on the surface, dying for someone else’s colony.
Jon gave up the cargo bay code and listened to the doors cycle open. The pirates took the trees. They had already drained the warp core of every drop of jump fuel, and mentioned — pleasantly — that they would be taking the monks as well, since there were always corporations in the market for indentured workers. Prisoners with jobs. Bennett, without moving, walked the ship’s own cameras and watched EVA-suited figures hooking the container to a dropship with a great iron cross painted across its nose. Carl, kneeling to help a wounded monk lie down, ran a quiet diagnostic and found that the impulse engines had been rigged to detonate the moment anyone lit them.
So they went to work in silence. Bennett found Benny Letcher and Jackal locked in the armory, and Weaver asleep in an engineering crawlway with no idea any of it was happening, and told all three of them what was standing in the shuttle bay. Weaver went down to the engines with a cigarette hanging off his lip beneath a wall of NO SMOKING placards and started closing fuel valves. Marge and Etna asked permission to treat the wounded before they were handed over, and got it, and used it to move people into corners and tell them to hold on to something.
Then Carl blew the hatch on the salvage bay, and the whole ship slammed sideways.
Everything happened at once after that. The Iron Cross boarding pod tore loose and went spinning out into vacuum. Jon threw himself clear and put rounds into his captor until the plates in the man’s vest came apart. Etna, aiming a foam gun at the pirate holding her — a man his crew called Fox — glued the two of them together instead, and spent the rest of the fight fighting the foam while Jason Fiero stood beside her, fixed in place and entirely out of the war. Marge opened a man’s chest with the pulse rifle. Dax came around a corner with a shotgun in each hand and killed Thrall on her crate. Bernard got up off the floor of the med bay and beat his guard with a crowbar until a cybernetic arm came up and stopped it dead and left his hands ringing; the man’s name was Zeid, and Bernard did not stay to learn anything else about him.
One of them didn’t die properly. Benny put a shotgun blast into the back of a pirate whose veins glowed faintly through the skin, and Jax Vanko said oh, and stood back up, and turned around slowly to look at him. When Jackal hit him in the chest a moment later, what sprayed out was not blood but something luminous and blue. Dixie broke a vial of acid over him on her way past.
Kross saw how it was going and spoke into his wrist. Tanya, pull the cord. Nobody in the shuttle bay knew who Tanya was or where she was standing. The ship’s own voice came over the PA a heartbeat later to inform everyone aboard that self-destruct was in sixty seconds and that they should proceed to the escape pods.
Dixie went for the reactor at a sprint with Bennett, Weaver, and Arnold piling down after her — an engineer, an android, a broken-armed salvager and a drunk, elbowing each other aside on the ladder. They tore panels open and bridged connections and pulled valves for six seconds at a time while the count ran down. Arnold, working one-handed with a borrowed tool kit, got them halfway there. Weaver, humming to himself with a spanner in his fist, made the last cut with a second to spare, and the alarm stopped, and the silence afterward was worse.
Benny finished Vanko with a shotgun blast to the neck. Jackal wrestled Kross to the deck and pinned his arms, and the ruined mouth said we’re all going to die here, and Jon — out of patience, out of mercy — gave the word to end him.
Which left Tanya. Carl reached the bridge at a dead run, found it empty — found it, as far as his eyes could tell him, completely empty — dropped into his chair, and felt with sudden and complete certainty that he was about to die. He ducked sideways for his blanket. The air above him rippled like heat off a plate, the top half of the pilot’s chair came away with the metal glowing molten where it parted, and for a heartbeat a shape resolved in the shimmer — a soldier, a glowing blade — and then dissolved again.
Bernard came onto the bridge behind him and dumped the fire suppression system into the compartment to make her visible, which worked. He could not shut it off, which did not. The oxygen went out of the room and Carl went down with it, and Bernard went down a few seconds later, and she kept moving between them, a fold in the air with a sword in it. Marge arrived with a rebreather and a tank, put her rifle into the shimmer, and blood appeared in midair and ran down onto the deck, and something screeched — not quite a machine, not quite a person. It did not put her down.
Out on the hull, the salvage arm reached after the fleeing Iron Cross dropship as it hauled the cargo away, missed once in Dixie’s hands, and caught it in Bennett’s — the servos straining hard enough that everyone aboard could feel the ship complain. Bennett took the battered HANG IN THERE poster he had looted from the colony office out of his pocket, stuck it to a bulkhead, and kissed it. He and Dax sealed their suits, looked at each other, bumped fists, and ran out of the airlock into open space along the arm, toward the ship that had taken everything.