Imagine just the ugliest fucking lobster you’ve ever seen, except sky-scraper sized, and with these giant squirmy tentacles covered in impractically large suckers. Like, you’re grabbing whales with those things and not much else. It was covered in mottled blue-brown armor, fuzzy with millions of alien barnacles, as it rose from ocean waters that were really too shallow for something like this to be hanging around in.

And it was angry.

The only warning we got was what I can only describe as apocalyptic chittering before a claw the size of one of those London double-decker buses crashed into the side of our hull. The Ragnar was practically indestructible, its neutronium hull wreathed in multiple layers of shields. Pelas-class etherships are rated to withstand meteor strikes, because there’s always that one prissy weather god that won’t just lay down and fucking die. So we could take a hit from an overgrown prawn any day of the week.

As an almighty crunch blew out my eardrums and my world turned sideways, I made a mental note to figure out what kind of screwy weeks they had around here. In retrospect, that was probably me going into shock.

Alarms blared—the “oh fuck” kind, not that I could hear them, but they glared a deep, emergency red tinged with etheric notes of panic. The g-forces whipped us around in our seats, bashing me against the headrest and bruising up my arms. Might have fractured a rib despite the cushioning, I don’t know, I was kind of occupied, okay? The Ragnar spun end over end, bouncing on the waves like a skipping stone, if a skipping stone could bruise you down to your internal organs every time it hit the ocean. Oh god I was so nauseous. And the inertial dampeners were almost certainly fucked. One particularly violent bounce left the Ragnar pirouetting in the air. I screamed with pain and rage, which helped with the disorientation a little.

Slamming into the ocean one last time—it slapped the wind right out of my lungs, abruptly cutting off my scream—the commander managed to regain control of the ship, taking us on a spiraling path away from the water. The Ragnar was limping, but still airborne. I gasped, trying to get my breath back, but vomited instead.

Markus was shouting at me. I watched him distantly. He was handsome by Earth standards. Pretty wide face, good jaw, bit of stubble. He normally looked confident, but right now his expression was one of frustration. Maybe because I couldn’t hear him. He needed to talk louder, I couldn’t hear him over the high-pitched whine. Wait. I couldn’t hear him at all. That seemed like something I should handle. I should handle it. Markus gestured emphatically at me. I should—my comm. I forced my sluggish thoughts to send an activation command to my personal comm.

Eifni comms read the speaker’s meaning straight from the ether. Normally they’re used for universal translation, but it also comes in handy if your fragile human ears just broke.

“I’m back!” I wheezed. Opening my mouth was a mistake. I vomited again next to my chair.

“Shoot the fucking angels!” Markus shouted back.

“What about fucking Lobsterzilla?” I said, but obeyed, training my disruptors—the two that were still responding to controls, anyways—on a group of three cloaky boys trying to flank through my firing arc. Last mistake they ever made.

“Primary batteries engaged,” said Val. “Permission to fire?”

“Granted.”

“Fuck you, Lobsterzilla!” I screamed, wisping another angel.

Val opened up with the fusion cannons. I couldn’t hear a thing, but the thud-thud-thud-thud that echoed through the hull rattled my already aching bones. My vision went blurry. The cabin temperature, insulation ruined with the gash in our hull, immediately jumped to uncomfortable levels.

And we hit Lobsterzilla with the goddamned sun.

Oh, it screamed. My comm helpfully translated for me, which made my brain hurt until I managed to mute that particular signal. The four fusion rounds blazed through the air—literally, they set the air on fire—straight through the sea monster, disintegrating armor and flesh like it wasn’t even there to begin with. The growing wall of fire in their wake followed immediately after, char-broiling the poor bastard through its armor. Between the exit wounds and the general trauma, Lobsterzilla snapped in half, flaming chiton shrapnel shredding nearby birds before the firestorm roasted the rest. The top half exploded as it boiled from the inside, spraying meat everywhere. One blackened, severed tentacle flopped lazily through the air, trailing ember-illuminated smoke.

Behind the burning, bubbling fountain of lobster meat, four searing lights plunged into the ocean depths, where they dumped enough thermal energy to vaporize a couple million gallons of seawater. The scalding fog plumed upward like a mushroom cloud, darkening the sun.

“Target neutralized,” said Val, like he hadn’t just personally called down humanity’s best imitation of the wrath of God. Smug bastard.

“Woooooo!” said Markus, pumping a fist in the air. I smiled fiercely, but only cheered in my head. Get smited, you fucking prawn.

“Would it kill you to maintain some semblance of professionalism?” said Val. “This is why Abby doesn’t trust you with the big guns.”

Not trusting myself to open my mouth again, I weakly flipped him off. The bird isn’t a Velean gesture, but I did it often enough that a smart guy like him would have picked it up by now.

The angels were running. I chuckled darkly. One by one, they vanished into the steam like they’d never been there, leaving us alone with the boiling fog and the lobster bits still raining from the sky. The ocean foamed red with gore. The alarms were still blaring, the Ragnar was limping, but the fist of the gods had come down and broken on our ship.

“Screens are clear. They’ve withdrawn. We need to move fast. Markus, take over piloting. Val, damage report. Lilith, you’re on overwatch.”

“Yes’m,” Markus and I said in unison, leaving Val on his own with “Acknowledged.”

Markus looked questioningly at me. I stared him down. He quirked his lips in the Velean equivalent of an eye roll.

“Commander, one casualty. Lilith’s ears are bleeding. Probably double rupture.”

“Val, take a look when you’re done.”

“Acknowledged,” he said. Bastard didn’t even look up from his diagnostic console.

Markus unstrapped quickly and moved to the cabin door, carefully stepping around the puddles of vomit. The hallway outside the cabin was more brightly lit than usual—the gash in the hull came surprisingly close to us. I wondered if the oracle had been trying to kill us specifically. I flipped a switch on my targeting console to give myself control of the full range of the Ragnar’s arsenal—minus the primary guns, damn Val. I was perfectly trustworthy. And I only felt slightly drunk from the damage to my inner ears. You remember when you were a kid and you spun around in circles until the whole world started spinning too? The world was spinning, and it wouldn’t fucking stop.

I leaned over the armrest and emptied the rest of my stomach onto the floor. I was never going to take the seat next to the door again.

“Sanitize,” said Val, still not looking up. A scrubber detached from the wall, attending to my mess.

“What the fuck was that?” I asked when I felt like I could safely open my mouth. My voice felt growly from the stomach acid, and presumably sounded that way too. “They were waiting right at the insertion point!”

“Team, your analysis,” said Abby.

“We guessed it was a scout,” said Markus, now on comms, probably still making his way to the helm. “Oracles aren’t that good. There were probably more ambush parties waiting for us in other locations.”

“It was too precise,” said Val. “That ambush was choreographed.”

“We beat it,” I growled. “It’s good. Not good enough.”

“That could be a deception it’s trying to sell us,” Val noted.

“Val,” said Abby, “what did you get off those angels?”

“Damage report first,” he replied. “Wait but a moment.”

“Thousand one, thousand two,” I coughed. Val raised an eyebrow at me. That gesture meant what it usually did.

“The hull’s been breached,” said Abby. “The deformation around the breach is consistent with a blessing. Pure physical trauma would have crumpled more of the surrounding area. This close to the passenger cabin, we’re looking at subsystem damage as well.”

“Lots of it,” said Val. “Multiple weapons systems offline. We’re down to three out of five conceptual shields. We’ve lost backup power, but main’s still online. Inertial dampeners are down.”

Ha! Called it!

“Translation engines have warning lights but pass macro functionality checks. Recommend minimizing usage of them. Climate control is, obviously, troubled, given the hull breach—but the systems are operational.”

“We’re not spaceworthy,” I said, feeling the horror dawning.

“Correct,” said Val. “We are stranded here until we can make repairs.”

“And if the oracle knew we’d be here, it’s probable they know our next move,” said Abby. “Markus, are you situated?”

“Ready to go, Commander.”

“Get us moving. Random walk until we have a plan. Val, continue your report.”

He did. There was a lurch as we accelerated. Right, the inertial dampeners were out. The passenger door opened, and Abby walked briskly to the empty seat in the middle. There was an obvious moment where she took in the sight of me and the scrubber as she passed, but she didn’t pause. She pulled down her targeting console as she sat.

“Thank you, Val. Lilith, you’re relieved. I have overwatch. Go clean yourself off.”

“Yes’m,” I said, returning my console to the ceiling. I unstrapped, peeled myself out of the chair, and promptly fell over.

“Fuck,” I bit out. “I can’t walk, ma’am.”

“Her proprioception is damaged,” said Val. “Allow me.”

“I’ll crawl.”

“Help her to med bay,” said Abby. Val made his way over to me and helped pull me up. I grumbled.

“We’ll get you fixed up,” he said reassuringly. Normally I’d suspect condescension behind the statement, but what I was currently “hearing” was ripped straight from the meaning of his words, and they’d apparently been delivered without connotative information at all—apparently, in his mind, he’d just been stating a fact. I didn’t dwell on it too long because I was distracted by the fact that I couldn’t fucking walk.

“I know,” I said, the world swinging crazily with each step. “I just hate this.”

“Just to set your expectations,” he said. “With the warnings on the translation engine diagnostics, it might not be safe to reset your ears.”

“Fuck,” I said.

“Of course, we can also flash you to—”

“How long to heal naturally?” I cut him off.

He didn’t react to being interrupted. “Three to eight weeks, if I recall correctly.” He always did. “If we’re unlucky, months. You’ll need antibiotics.”

I didn’t respond, mostly because a wave of nausea hit me and I had to keep my mouth shut. I didn’t know if I could take three weeks in bed.

“Commander,” said Val, “I haven’t finished analyzing the frequency transform of the angels, but we’re dealing with a fertility goddess at least.”

“Confirm. You think it’s our oracle?”

“The harmonics work out. Fertility can progress to legacy.”

“Strong progression,” I said. “Maybe it’s biphasic already.” Biphasic, a god with two fully developed aspects. Stronger than monophasic or progressive monophasic, but easier to kill: rip it in half down the aspects, and neither half survives the process.

“No,” said Val, holding me up as I stumbled again. “Signal strength was consistent with progressive monophase. The concern is that there’s another match for the frequency: the defensive barrier at the realspace horizon.”

The rest of the team was silent.

We’d punched through easily enough, true, but your run-of-the-mill pantheon can’t muster the firepower to match an Eifni ethership. We hadn’t considered that defense might not be its only purpose.

Oracles work by reading the distant echoes of future events in the ether. Most of them can’t pick up anything stronger than “calamity will happen,” or “a great conqueror will arise,” or stuff like that with big effects. Bright stars are easier to see in the night sky. Oracles see us coming often enough, because murdering all the gods is kind of like a supernova in this analogy. The smart ones can even triangulate our general location, but there are ways to mute those signals with tactics or extraneous etheric noise. Light pollution, if you will.

The barrier wasn’t a wall. It was the Hubble Telescope. She could see everything.

The first emergency broadcast hit us, then the second, and third. All over the planet, godslayers were dying.

Then all was silence.