The wormhole dropped me on a platform the size of a football field, and underneath the platform there was a star.Not a dead one; a dying one. The surface was close enough that the heat came through the floor material in long, slow pulses. The city built on top of it stretched in every direction, towers, walkways and open plazas, all made from the same gold-tinted material that the invitation spike had been made from. Everything glowed faintly from below.[New environment detected. Stellar proximity warning. Ambient energy absorption is active.]I took one step forward and the field hit me.It wasn't painful, it was just sudden. Like someone pulled a coat off my shoulders, except the coat was sixty pounds of integrated armor and scale plating. The black scales peeled away in sheets and dissolved before they hit the floor. My plasma housing went with them. The phase-state anchors in my skin went quiet. When it was done I was standing in plain clothes, roughly human-shaped, no visible

The Emperor's hand was gone up to the wrist before I moved.It wasn't dissolved, but consumed. The skin peeled back in layers and what was underneath went the same way, fast and neat, like something was eating inward from the surface. He watched it happen with his jaw set and his eyes calm. "You need to leave the Garden," he said. "What about you?" I asked. "I've been exposed," he said. "Leaving won't help me." He looked up. "Go to sublevel four. Get your father and use the east corridor, not the main hall."I stood up, the bench under me had a dark patch spreading across the armrest nearest him. I looked at it, the material was softening, and going dark at the edges."Go," he said. I wentThe corridor outside the Garden was already wrong. The walls on the left side had patches of black sludge forming at the joins, spreading slowly down toward the floor.It smelled like something biological and old, not sharp, just heavy and pervasive. Two of the Emperor's guards were standing at th

"Wait," I said. The clone looked at me. The sludge was already moving up her wrists, she hadn't pulled her hands back."There's another way," I said."There isn't," she said. "I've been doing the math since the hangar. The path is two hundred meters and the Rot won't hold open for biomass it can't verify.It needs something alive and it needs it now." She looked down at her hands. "I'm the only one it already knows.""You don't have to do this," my father said. She looked at him. "I know." She looked back at me. "The escape vessel is in the private bay on the north side of the hangar level. The Emperor kept it separate from the main fleet. It's on a raised platform, above the sludge line." She pulled her display chip out of her pocket and held it toward me. "The layout is on there. Bay seven."I took the chip. "Go now," she said. "Once I go under, the path holds for about four minutes. Maybe five.""Four minutes," I said. "Yes. Move fast." I looked at her for a second. She had Elowen'

I woke up on my back on a metal floor with a bar across my chest and four walls of thick wire mesh on all sides.I sat up. My calcification was down to my knees, the rest had reverted during whatever they had used to knock me out. My ribs were tender on the left side, three of them, and my right eye was swollen enough that I had to turn my head to see the full width of the cage.The cage was in a pit. The pit was roughly circular, about forty meters across, with tiered seating rising up from the edges. Half the seats were filled. The audience was mixed, a dozen species at least, some I recognized and some I didn't. All of them watching the floor of the pit where two things were currently tearing each other apart.I watched long enough to get the layout. Three cages on the pit floor, mine was on the left. The center cage held the two fighters and the right cage was occupied.[Biological reserves at 34%. Calcification retracted. Current threat level: moderate.][Recommend assessment bef

I hit the floor and stayed there. "He's done," one of the crew said above me.I kept my heart at one beat. Slow, deep, barely there and the calcification helped. Less biological activity to read. I let my eyes go half-open and my jaw slack and I waited."Get him out before the next round," another voice said. "The collector wants the cage clean." Two sets of hands grabbed my ankles and dragged me across the magnetic floor. The friction pulled at the calcification on my legs but I stayed loose. They dragged me through the slot at the bottom of the cage and across the pit floor and through a side door into a service corridor.They dropped my ankles. "Dump shaft's at the end," the first one said. "I'll get the cart." One set of footsteps walked away. One stayed. I waited three seconds, then I pushed every bit of calcification I had left outward through my skin at once.The crack was loud in the corridor. The bone fragments came off my arms, chest and legs like a burst pressure seal, no