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  The hull rang like a bell.

  “Countermeasures engaging charm-torps . . . neutralized . . . second wave deployed by the swarm . . . closing . . .”

  “How long can we last?”

  “Countermeasures exhausted . . . we can’t parry a third wave; not at this range.”

  Sora closed her eyes and made the weapon spit death.

  She had targeted two of the three elements of the Husker swarm; leaving the third – the furthest ship from her – unharmed.

  She watched the relativistic black holes fold space around the two targeted ships, crushing each instantly, as if in a vice.

  “Third ship dropping to max . . . maximum attack range; retracting charm-torp launchers . . .”

  “This is Sora for the Cohort,” she said in Main, addressing the survivor on the general ship-to-ship channel. “Or what remains of the Cohort. Perhaps you can understand what I have to say. I could kill you, now, instantly, if I chose.” She felt the weapon speak to her through her blood, reporting its status, its eagerness to do her bidding. “Instead, I’m about to give you a demonstration. Are you ready?”

  “Sora . . .” said the familiar. “Something’s wrong . . .”

  “What?”

  “I’m not . . . well.” The familiar’s voice did not sound at all right now; drained of any semblance to Sora’s own. “The ring must be constructing something in your brain; part of the interface between you and the gun . . . something stronger than me . . . It’s weeding me out, to make room for itself . . .”

  She remembered what Merlin had said about the structures the ring would make.

  “You saved a part of yourself in the ship.”

  “Only a part,” the familiar said. “Not all of me . . . not all of me at all. I’m sorry, Sora. I think I’m dying.”

  She dismantled the system.

  Sora did it with artistry and flair, saving the best for last. She began with moons, pulverizing them, so that they began to flow into nascent rings around their parent worlds. Then she smashed the worlds themselves to pieces, turning them into cauls of hot ash and plasma. Finally – when it was the only thing left to destroy – she turned the gun on the system’s star, impaling its heart with a salvo of relativistic black holes, throwing a killing spanner into the nuclear processes that turned mass into sunlight. In doing so, she interfered – catastrophically – with the delicate hydrostatic balance between pressure and gravity that held the star in shape. She watched it unpeel, shedding layers of outer atmosphere in a premature display of the death that awaited suns like it, four billion years in the future. And then she watched the last Husker ship, which had witnessed what she had wrought, turn and head out of the system.

  She could have killed them all.

  But she had let them live. Instead, she had shown the power that was – albeit temporarily – hers to command.

  She wondered if there was enough humanity left in them to appreciate the clemency she had shown.

  Later, she took Tyrant into the Waynet again, the vast luminous bulk of the gun following her like an obedient dragon. Sora’s heart almost stopped at the fearful moment of entry, convinced that the syrinx would choose not to sing for its new master.

  But it did sing, just as it had sung for Merlin.

  And then, alone this time – more alone than she had been in her life – she climbed into the observation blister, and turned the metasapphire walls transparent, making the ship itself disappear, until there was only herself and the rushing, twinkling brilliance of the Way.

  It was time to finish what Merlin had begun.

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  Merlin’s Gun