CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Five years ago and ninety-three million light-years inward, Dextera Adequin Rake stands holding a rifle to the head of the last Viator breeder.
In the bright wash of lights from the purring generator, everything is more detailed, more nuanced. This close, this exposed, she sees more than usual, more than she’s comfortable with.
Stark flecks of maroon stipple the breeder’s segmented, slate-gray carapace—they’re middle-aged for a Viator, fifty or sixty years. Tiny reflections of her rifle’s barrel shine in each of their four glossy eyes, black as oil slicks, black as the void. A black she won’t know a true comparison for until well after she’s ended this.
The lines of pleated skin on the breeder’s forehead pull taut, loosen, then quiver before stiffening as their thin lips turn down—a look Adequin is incapable of interpreting. On a human, it could be called a gathering of will, a precursor to defiance, a judgment, a fleck of pity. But one expression cannot be all these things, unless you know what to look for. It’s a level of detail only another of their kind can fully grasp, one that requires the inherent understanding of one’s own species. So her interpretation is meaningless, and she knows better.
Under her hardsuit, sweat-slicked fingers twitch. She reaffirms her grip, stock tight to her shoulder.
The largest two of the breeder’s dark eyes blink slowly. They’re patient. They wait.
Many thoughts run through her head at once.
Where the fuck is Griffith? is predominant. He’d been clearing the mountain pass behind her, but he hadn’t arrived yet. He should be here. She needs him.
But if Griffith is captured or dead, does it change anything? She’d killed dozens of Viators on the way up this mountain. She’d run her bloody gauntlet without hesitation and without questioning a single pull of the trigger.
There is a bitter pleasure in being here, alone, sole witness to the end of something so hard fought, something earned with so much blood and pain over so many endless, tiring years. This moment has been built on the lives of billions over millennia. How can something so far-reaching culminate in something so intimate—a single breeder on a single planet with a single soldier, a finger’s twitch away from—
Xenocide. That’s what this is.
Even then, she doesn’t realize she’s hesitating for any reason other than to savor the moment.
This is it. The culmination of a brutal nine-year war. The result of everything the Legion gave her. Every deadly mission, every comrade lost, everything she’d prepared for since she was sixteen. They’ve sculpted her, trained her, trusted her. She’s a Titan among men.
She stands before the last of them as an example. She’s supposed to be the best mankind has to offer. When she pulls that trigger, she’ll have made a decision for her entire species. And she won’t be able to hide behind an order or a mission objective or a greater purpose. There’s a limit to what you can justify in the name of precaution.
But they’d killed so many.
Mankind had been decimated in the wake of the Viator War. Billions had died. Not to mention the half a dozen other sentient species that had been wiped out completely. Then only humanity remained, persistent, unwilling to lay down and die.
So the Viators had taken matters into their own hands and tried to take humanity’s future, their virility, and they’d almost succeeded. Four hundred years gone, and they still hadn’t recovered, and they didn’t know if they ever would.
But when the war was over, it was over. And they’d thought that was the end of it.
Yet here they are on the fringes of the Outer Core, breeding and plotting and amassing. Conspiring with Drudgers and enslaving Savants, gathering a force to take back what the humans had unjustly ripped from them. And she knows from experience, they will do so in the most bloody way possible. Not because they’re spiteful, but because it’s easier.