We stood in the great cryogenic room aboard Heaven’s Hawk. The inert form of the demon machine lay crumpled beside one of the tanks, missing its head and a great deal of its chest cavity. Though I had switched off the power, we were talking about an ancient god here. I had beaten him because he had stopped thinking about me, fully focused as he was on humiliating Joanna. I didn't fool myself into thinking that I could use the same trick twice and survive. So the moment we got the metal body down into my ship, I had removed the processor in the head as well as the extra data storage device I had found in its chest. There was a lot in there, but I had been able to isolate the part of the vast quantity of data contained within that I was sure represented the real Barbas. The rest of it I erased with a certain savage satisfaction. I knew now that I couldn't do the same to the gods in their cells. There was some loophole the oldest of them could exploit involving quantum computing- but since the Dark One in this body had uploaded himself into hardware, he was vulnerable. And now he was gone. It was a shame that he had killed so many of my people before I had figured out how to stop him.

Nissikul, it turned out, had survived, mainly because she was stubborn as the mountain we all lived on, and she simply refused to bleed to death. All of her wounds had been frozen in fragments of witch-ice, even in as she lay unconscious. Many of the other Stormcallers were dead- they had apparently been among those most heavily targeted by the Eater Spawn- but those that remained seemed to have decided that Nissi was some kind of warrior prophet. And so the endless cycle of religion and myth keeps turning, remarked a cynical, ancient part of me, but even Palamun couldn’t fully condemn the whole thing. Who knew if there really wasn’t a real God out there? Just because one group of power-mad mortals had dared to encroach into the realm of the divine, did that make them gods? After all, as I now knew, even the race of people from which Ravanur and Palamun had sprung, were but a blip in time when compared to the age of the stars, the age of the universe. Let the remaining Stormcallers venerate my sister. Perhaps I could get Joanna to change the word from god to Saint. That would have a nice ring to it. Saint Nissikul. We could canonize them all: Saint Thukkar the Stalwart, Saint Joanna the Fierce, Saint Volistad… what would they call me, five-hundred years from now?

Joanna finished stripping out of her bloodied sealskin clothes, and I looked up for a moment with interest. Even in the aftermath of the worst day of my life, a part of me perked up, but I clubbed it back down. This was not the time. She climbed into one of the two pods standing at the center of the room, where Palamun had made the switch between his various hosts. I met her eyes as I finished connecting the robot head to the cables that had once led to the second tank. “Do you understand what we’re about to do here?”

She nodded, shuddering as the crystal front panel sealed in front of her and cryo-amniotic fluid began to fill the space, crawling slowly up her body. I noted with a clinical sort of detachment that any wounds she had taken in the battle, just twelve hours before, were already gone. She didn’t even have bruises. I, on the other hand, looked like a horrible fright mask of myself. I wasn’t sure there was a part of me that wasn’t composed mostly of bruises. The leg by which the demon had dragged me had healed when I told it to, but apparently, there were limits to my control. Blame it on my inexperience or my distraction, I wasn't going to be running any foot-races anytime soon, and the trip down the ladder to this ship had been its own special form of hell. But it didn’t matter. What was done was done.

I reached out with my mind, sending signals through my nanite clouds to the cryogenic tank and coupling its internal network with the cybernetic lattice I found in Joanna’s brain. It was a very cunning piece of work, and I wondered if I would ever get to meet the sort of people who had designed it. Perhaps it was the ancient machine god in my head, but I was finding myself liking this whole “advanced technology” thing. Maybe I would keep doing it after the ice was gone.

I felt Joanna's mind connect to the network as the cryo-amniotic fluid rose to her chin. She closed her eyes as the liquid crested over her head and breathed deep. She was completely encased in it now, and her lungs were taking air directly from the tank. I checked the connections on the head one last time, grimaced, and activated it. The dream began coming together between Joanna and the spirit trapped inside the head almost immediately. I thought about watching but then thought better of it. It was best to allow a woman her privacy, especially in her last moment with her friend. Her former lover, a primal part of me corrected, growling with poorly suppressed jealousy. I snorted. She was with me, now. So what did it matter? I activated the monitor and waved a negligent hand at the floor behind me. A stool rose up smoothly beneath me, and I sat down to wait for my moment.