I’m watching his feed so closely that I’m hit with vertigo and almost crash into a fallen statue as he plummets off his perch toward the rocks below. He stops himself only two meters above the slope—ever the patrician showman—and ricochets at a near right angle to skim down the western face of Sungrave’s mountain range.
I avoid crashing and gain confidence. My speed doubles. Antechambers, passageways, grottos blur past. I hit the breach through which we entered the city just as Cassius begins his attack. He flies low and fast over the dark mountainside. The warriors don’t see him coming in the dim light. With his razor out to his right, he decapitates an Obsidianshoving the Pink boys along on the transport’s ramp. The others barely even notice it’s happened. Cassius turns his flightpath right to flick off the arm of another Obsidian manhandling two of the Violet captives. He skewers a third Obsidian in the eye-shield of his helmet as he turns toward the noise.
Three down. Nine left. But now he has their attention.
By the time I exit the main breach and rocket into the sky, Cassius has shot out the other side of the Obsidians. A graceful flier, he absorbs only the G’s he must to slow his ricochet back into them to shoot through their ranks on a second pass. It is called thepella maneuver—in which an armored Gold ricochets back and forth like a bouncing ball between two walls, murdering with each pass. In times long gone, the pella was an impressive and reliable tactic. It was also something we taught our Volk braves to counter in the third year of the war. Cassius is in for it.
I gain altitude and head west toward the fight. It’s three kilometers away. Wind buffets my body. The broken mountain range blurs beneath me as I pick up speed. The fight still hidden from my direct line of sight, I watch Cassius’s feed with mounting anxiety.
He races back toward the Obsidians in his pella maneuver, but instead of finding a bewildered enemy, shocked and awed by his sudden attack, he finds an organized enemy with tactics refined in the killing fields of the Core. He will not have heard the first Obsidian to spot him yell, “Pella! Pella! Pella!” Nor that his fellows have taken up the call and shouted out numbers to make wedges by threes. By the time he’s upon them, the Obsidians formed their wedges. Almost all the wedges are led by a brave with a shield or in heavy armor and with a heavy triarii’s spear—and flanked by heavy guns.
Cassius is fast, so the enemy is slow to open fire, but Cassius spends so much time dodging the unexpected salvo that his attack is wasted. He feints bailing out, giving him a gap, and passes an Obsidian wedge close enough to jab at the helmet of the lead Obsidian. The blade screeches off the heavy metal, and Cassius barely bats a spear away from impaling his thigh. He fires backward with his pulseFist, missing the other two. He’s wasted his charge on only one wedge, and as he passes he does not see the Obsidians with gravBoots shoot upward from the wedges to track him.
I’m closing in. I scan the sky. It is clear. No support ships. I pull BadLass, prime my pulseFist, and fly several thousand meters higher, until I’m directly overtop the Obsidian ship. Cassius and the Obsidians are dots below. I see no other enemies in any direction. I angle head-down and kill my boots. Freefalling, I watch Cassius’s feed. He ricochets back for his next pass.
Unfamiliar with the Obsidian tactics, it takes him a moment to realize there are fewer wedges than before, and by the time he wonders where the other Obsidians went, they’re screaming down at him like falcons. I warn him, and he veers right just in time to dodge the first Obsidian’s lance. He’s quick enough to slash the netman’s net in half and veer upward just before it envelopes him, but he doesn’t see the heavy hammer that hits him in the left shoulder like an arrow hitting an eagle.
Cassius careens sideways and smashes down in a cloud of shattered sulfur crystals. I continue falling, still unseen by the occupied enemy. Cassius’s helmet cam view is rocks on the ground as he heaves for air. He tries to stand and falls flat, rolling sideways to see six braves sprinting at him with axes the size of Reds and scalping knives meant for hair like his. Time to focus. I turn off his visual feed and pick my targets by altitude.
The airborne Obsidians form a triangle over the fight. I fall upon them at a hundred and eight kilometers an hour. I chop through the neck of the highest Obsidian. Recall my blade. Chop another on my left as I continue down to the third. He turns on me before I get there, so I shoot him as he raises his railgun. His pulseShield takes the first two blasts. The third bends the shield back until it glows opaque. He deactivates it just before it melts inward. He banks left. I conserve ammunition, mirror his trajectory left, pirouette past his pulsefire, bat his axe to the side, and spear him through the weak armor at his throat before carrying on to the ground.
Skarde should be embarrassed. His lads are lazy today. They thought they had Io whipped. Were they still in my army, this lack of discipline would not stand. That thought fills me with contempt. These men deserted me. They left the Free Legions to die. So now they will.
Against Obsidians, speed is all. Combine that with constantly shifting between vertical levels in the sphere of battle, and you stand a chance.
I swoop down on the pack of Obsidians just as they track me fromthe ground. I shoot one point-blank and snap my whip around another. The third thrashes as Cassius’s blade punches through his back. The one I stabbed in the throat in the air finally lands with a thud. I fly upward immediately, dragging the Obsidian my whip ensnared by his leg. I contract the whip into a blade two hundred meters up. The razor slices through his armored calf. Released, he plummets down. I follow and use his mass to conceal my descent.
The wounded brave windmills haplessly at me as he freefalls. I stay just out of his reach but close enough that his friends on the ground don’t see me coming until it’s too late. I veer off my cover just before the brave impacts the ground.
My trick didn’t fool everyone. Something blurs toward me from the left. An impact rocks me. My vision flickers black. I wake a half second later, needles jolting through my body. Rail slug. Huge one. Must have hit my pulseShield. A dent the size of an egg has made a home in the left pectoral of my armor.
Furious at the dent in my new gear, I look for someone to kill.
“Two o’clock,”Cassius calls. I track him in my helmet’s rearview camera feed—a blur of gray metal tearing toward me like a bus. I wait, boost up with my gravBoots, invert, and cleave the Obsidian’s head down the center as he passes under at what must be sixty kilometers an hour. I revert, land, and flick the blood off my blade. It freezes in a long strand and shatters as it hits the ground.
“Engines hot! Engines hot!”Cassius calls.
I turn to see two surviving braves retreating onto one of the transports. They open fire on me. I activate my aegis and it shunts power from the pulseFist to form a blue shield on my left arm. I buck as the rounds pound the barrier. The ship takes off and just before the door closes, Cassius gives a boost from his gravBoots to land like a grasshopper inside. The doors seal behind him and the ship’s engines groan as it gets airborne.
Shit.
I burst into the air, pursue, and land on its hull before it gains enough velocity to outpace my boots. I stab my razor into the hull to gain traction. Walking like an old man with a cane, I make slow progress toward the cockpit. The transport gains altitude rapidly. I hack off its coms array as I pass. The antennae pinwheels toward the shrinking ground, black but for rivers of magma. Dark clouds whip past, stained red by thetransport’s external lights. Just before I reach the cockpit, the transport bucks. I’m caught so off guard I lose my grip on my razor and slam into its top gun turret.
I’m dazed. Falling. Spinning like a leaf through blackness and clouds. I arrest my fall with my boots, gain my bearings, zip out of the murk of the clouds, and see the transport to the south carving a gash of light into the darkness as it falls in a nosedive.
By the time I catch up, the transport has crash-landed at the foothills of a volcano range. Not knowing what I’ll find inside, I land on the top hull first to retrieve my razor. I say a silent prayer when I find Bad Lass right where I left it—half-stuck in the hull just shy of the cockpit.
Thraxa would have killed me if I lost her family blade. I jerk it out and walk back along the top hull to the ramp. I hop down just as Cassius stumbles out. He almost takes my head off with a blind swing. I deflect his slash and call out his name. He realizes his mistake, booms a laugh, and embraces me. Helmet to helmet.“Gorydamn. Gorydamn. You weren’t exaggerating. Those crows can fight. But man…Vulcan himself would stroke his loins to this armor.”He runs his gauntlets over the scored, blood-spattered gear.
“Idiot.” I shove him. “You almost got yourself killed.”
“Now, now. I just wanted to see the Reaper in an open field,”he says.“The verdict is in. You’re a menace to savage and civilized alike.”I pause, reflecting back on the battle for the first time. It’s been years since I felt in the flow like that. I grin ear to ear despite myself. The training with Cassius has brought my spark back.
“Are you injured?” I ask.
“Concussed, certainly. So, don’t shove me again. One of them got me with a hammer.”
“I saw. It was a big hammer.”
