Chapter 35 · The Butcher’s Name

The first defense cannon fired before Kellan could finish breathing.

White light punched through the maintenance deck windows. The whole chamber lurched sideways. Gravity vanished, returned, and slammed him against the grated floor hard enough to crack the plating beneath his shoulder. Somewhere below, metal screamed. Somewhere inside him, twenty-three million voices screamed with it.

Kellan opened his eyes to a rain of sparks.

“Move!” Brom shouted.

The mechanic seized the back of Kellan’s coat and dragged him behind a collapsed cargo hauler. Brom’s left side was wrapped in a blood-soaked pressure bandage, and his face had gone the gray color of old steel. He still managed to bare his teeth at Sable.

“You said the deck was shielded.”

“It was,” Sable answered.

She stood beside the broken command cradle, one hand pressed against a bleeding cut above her eyebrow. Behind her, the chamber’s dormant warframes rose from their racks one after another. Their armor plates unfolded like the limbs of waking insects. Blue targeting lenses ignited in the smoke.

“It isn’t anymore.”

A second cannon charge began outside.