The plans for separating the core chamber were found in the archives of the station's original builders.
The Celestial Palace had been assembled around the Abyss, not the other way round. The black heart had been delivered into orbit in a sealed container built to survive a fall from the atmosphere. The station, docks and residential sectors had been added later.
If the twenty-four mountings were blown, the chamber would become a separate vessel again.
The problem was that the container had no engines.
Su Zhihu suggested stripping the main propulsion modules from the evacuation shuttles. Every ship they dismantled meant hundreds of people who would not have time to leave the station.
"No," Vierlia said. "Evacuation comes first."
"In forty minutes there'll be nothing left to evacuate."
"Then we'll use the military interceptors."
"They belong to the Council division and are locked down."
Nalan Qingxin studied the registry.
"The head of the conglomerate can lift the lock. His company supplied the engines."
Her father was waiting by the sealed boarding airlock. He had already realised the family fleet would not be leaving. When his daughter demanded the code, he did not bargain.
"How many modules do you need?"
"Twelve."
"There are eighteen interceptors in the hangar. Take them all. Six may not start after being in storage."
"Is that all?"
"Were you expecting me to ask for a place on a rescue ship?"
"I'm expecting you to try to call this help atonement."
He lowered his eyes.
"It atones for nothing. I knew our equipment was being used on people. I did not ask for details because the reports brought us profit and military concessions. If we survive, I will testify."
"Even if they imprison you?"
"Especially then. Otherwise my confession is worth nothing."
Nalan Qingxin passed the code to Su Zhihu.
"I haven't forgiven you."
"I know."
"But I'm glad you stayed."
Her father nodded. It was more than he had expected.
Thirty-seven minutes.
On the external camera feeds, the Heart of the Swarm grew larger and larger. Its black silhouette was already blotting out the stars. Its foremost tendrils were entering the upper atmosphere, with millions of smaller creatures streaming behind its body.
The main assault began on the ground.
Huangfu deployed the combined forces along the old wall. For the first time, elite mecha-maidens from the Upper City stood beside work battalions from the Lower City. A distributed network linked them. It had no single command post: if one sector lost contact, its neighbours kept fighting.
Nangong Ci was responsible for evacuating the eastern districts. Luo Jun's sister reviewed every order she gave and recorded every decision.
"The third bridge is overloaded," the signaller reported. "We need to close the crossing for five minutes."
"There are still people on it."
"If the structure collapses, everyone will die."
Once, Nangong Ci would have chosen the objective and called the losses unavoidable. Now she ordered the freight tunnel opened, sent her own guards into it and only then halted traffic across the bridge.
"We lost three minutes," Luo Jun's sister observed.
"But we didn't lose any people."
"My brother was a person too."
Nangong Ci met her gaze.
"Yes."
One answer could not atone for her guilt. But at least Nangong Ci did not try to justify herself with a great cause again.
Thirty-two minutes.
The evacuation followed three routes. Red was for the wounded, blue for children and civilians, white for the technical shifts assigned to launch the pods. The old priority registry kept trying to redirect the best medics and aircrew to the Council's family dock. Nalan Qingxin deleted its rules one by one.
A group of children became trapped in one of the corridors. The automatic door demanded family clearance, even though a public rescue bay lay beyond it. Nalan Qingxin's father came to the door himself.
"My key no longer works," he said.
"You're the head of the conglomerate," the mechanic replied. "How can it not work?"
"My daughter locked the family branch."
The man took off his expensive jacket, borrowed a cutter from a technician and climbed up to the emergency mechanism. He knew the design: his company manufactured the doors. The plans included a manual lever, but to cut costs they had hidden it behind a decorative panel and left it out of the civilian instructions.
"Why didn't people know?" the mechanic asked.
"Because we sold maintenance separately."
"Even on a rescue station?"
"Especially here. Nobody reads government contracts until something goes wrong."
He cut open the panel, and the door rose. The children went through to the pods. The head of the conglomerate stayed to help the technical shift, seeing for the first time how many small decisions by his company had turned safety into a privilege.
In another sector, Baron Hente was trying to bring a container of family relics aboard a ship. Inside were paintings, jewellery and the cryopod of the family's founder. The cargo took up enough space for twenty-four people.
Vierlia ordered the container unloaded.
"This is part of Great Xia's cultural heritage!" the baron protested.
"Then it will survive the wait better than living passengers."
"You have no right to decide which is more valuable."
"At last you understand the meaning of the new order. The evacuation council has already confirmed the decision."
Cleaners, cooks and the families of junior technicians, none of whom had even been included on the station's lists, went aboard in place of the relics.
Vierlia led the last group of civilians to the rescue pods. There were not enough places. Several members of the old families demanded that a pod allocated to the technical shift be cleared for them.
"Our family names are in the priority registry," Baron Hente declared.
Vierlia tore the gold plaque from the door.
"The priority registry has been abolished."
"On whose orders?"
"Mine. You can appeal when you reach the ground."
She put two mechanics and a wounded guard into the pod. The baron remained in the public corridor with everyone else.
Twenty-eight minutes.
Su Zhihu and her flights hauled the engines through the depressurised hangar. Magnetic boots held their armour to the hull, but every pulse from the Heart of the Swarm tore people from the surface. One module drifted off into the void. A second jammed in the doors.
"We don't have enough thrust," Su Zhihu said.
Fan Yuan studied the trajectory on an ordinary terminal. Without True Sight, the numbers no longer resolved themselves. He got the first calculation wrong, then the second. There was almost no time left for a third.
Chi Yuyan held the channel open inside the core. She could hear the Heart of the Swarm trying to understand the distributed network. The gigantic mind replicated the structure it received, but each time it turned choice into command and broke the model.
"It's learning," she warned. "Soon it will find a way to isolate the nodes from one another."
"We need another twelve minutes."
"You have eight."
Fan Yuan looked at the map. They would not have twelve engines. Nine would not produce the speed in his calculations. In that case, there was no point sending the container towards the monster.
"Turn the nozzles towards the station," he said.
"You want to push the container with the blast?" Su Zhihu asked.
"Not the container. The station."
The Celestial Palace travelled through its orbit faster than any warship. If they detached the residential sections, turned the three surviving manoeuvring units and blew the central truss, the impulse would knock the container out of orbit and straight into the Heart's path.
"What's left of the station will enter the atmosphere," Nalan Qingxin said.
"We'll have time to steer it into the ocean. Has everyone been evacuated?"
Vierlia looked at the queue beside the final pod.
"Almost."
"How many?"
"A hundred and forty-six people, plus our group."
The last pod held a hundred and twenty.
Fan Yuan ordered the civilians sent down. The assault group would remain in the container with Chi Yuyan. After the collision, the engines were supposed to carry the chamber out through the opposite side.
"That doesn't sound much like a rescue plan," Nalan Qingxin observed.
"We have a plan for getting in. We'll work out how to leave once we're inside."
"I hate it when you say things like that," Vierlia said.
Every participant confirmed the decision separately. Mei Lan stayed behind to guard Murong. Nalan Qingxin's father took up position by the emergency reactor. Five flights secured the engines.
Before the container was sealed, each of them was given a minute to send a message to the ground.
Vierlia recorded an official order appointing an interim air commander and did not add a single personal word. Then she erased the recording and began again.
"If I return, your drill examination will still take place," she told her pupils. "If I don't, don't let anyone use my name as proof that an order matters more than a person."
Su Zhihu gave forty captains full access to the company's archives.
"Don't call the unit mine. And don't call Fan Yuan its owner either. If anyone does, I'll come back personally and put them right."
Nalan Qingxin sent the conglomerate's final key to the public registry. Now even her death would not allow the family to seal the data again.
Her father watched her from the reactor station.
"I'm proud of you," he said.
"Don't use your pride to claim my choice as your own."
"I won't. Then I'll simply say this: you did what I failed to do."
Nalan Qingxin nodded. That was one message she did not record.
Fan Yuan opened a channel to the Lower City school. The headmaster was expecting a hero's speech. Instead, Fan Yuan asked him to preserve the logs of every decision made during the operation, including his mistakes.
"Is that all?" the headmaster asked.
"If I don't come back, don't turn me into someone who was always right."
Chi Yuyan called no one. She sat beside the black heart, sustaining the channel and quietly repeating the names of the forty fighters. Fan Yuan sat down beside her.
"Are you afraid?" he asked.
"Very."
"So am I."
"You never used to say that."
"I used to think a commander had to look fearless."
"And now?"
"Now I have no reason to pretend I'm a fearless commander."
Chi Yuyan took his hand. No golden thread appeared between them.
"It's better this way," she said.
Three minutes.
The civilian pods left the station one after another. The automatic systems plotted courses for a deserted plateau, where volunteers were already setting up a medical camp.
The last pod would not launch. Twenty-two children and four adults remained in the airlock. The outer lock mechanism had lost power.
"If we supply power from the container, we won't have time to separate," Su Zhihu said.
"If we don't, they'll be left here," Chi Yuyan replied.
No one suggested abandoning them for the sake of the majority. Under the old system, twenty-six people would have become an acceptable loss. The new network did not guarantee that everyone would be saved, but it forced them to name the price aloud.
Nalan Qingxin's father found a bypass. He cut power to the family ship and redirected the energy to the emergency airlock. The container's engines retained their charge.
"Your ship won't take off now," the technician warned him.
"Then I'll have to use a public pod."
"There are no places left."
"Then I'll stay with the assault group."
Nalan Qingxin overheard them.
"You don't have to prove everything in one night."
"I won't. It's simply my ship, and my turn to make room."
The pod carrying the children departed ninety seconds before the container separated.
The Heart of the Swarm opened its outer ribs. A white channel burned within, aimed directly at the Abyss's core.
Chi Yuyan saw not a maw, but a road.
"It wants to take the black heart back into itself. There'll be almost no resistance."
"Then we'll go deeper," Fan Yuan said.
The mountings blew.
The container separated from the station. Su Zhihu fired all nine engines. The remains of the Celestial Palace turned, the central truss erupted, and orbital velocity became a blow.
The core chamber flew towards the Heart of the Swarm.
A few seconds before the collision, Fan Yuan saw Earth. On its night side, the new network burned in golden lines. They did not converge on a single tower. The light passed from city to city, wall to wall, person to person.
Then the black ribs closed around the container.
There was no impact.
The Heart of the Swarm swallowed the lost core.
Contact with Earth vanished.
The container walls opened as though a living creature had recognised a part of itself. Beyond them pulsed a corridor of black tissue. Thousands of white figures moved through it towards the group.
They wore the faces of mecha-maidens who had died during the fifty years of war.
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