“Why are you really here, Aurae?” I ask. “Cassius may buy the sympathizer story. You might explain your skills as part of a hetaera’s education. But—”
“I am here for Sevro,” she says. “That is the truth. Not the whole truth, but it is all the truth that matters, because it is all the truth that is useful.”
“And I suppose the path would tell me to accept that.”
“You tell me.” She smirks. “But do you really have a choice?”
I nod toDominusPortobello. “Make sure you put that where it counts.”
She salutes.
I head for the cargo bay.Cassius is already half dressed. It took us two days of work in the machine shop to reshape the Sun Industries armor Kavax sent with Cassius to look like the spartan-baroque styledpulseArmor of a House Rath knight. Now gray and purple, detailed with bulls and Hercules on the shoulders, our guises should do the trick.
“Don’t worry, I taught her well,” Cassius says. “She’s a natural.”
“I’m sure,” I say. When we are dressed, I check my chronometer. “Ninety seconds. Buttons up.”
We don our helmets. A chill trickles over my skin as I see the world through the pulseArmor’s lenses. Even if I loathe war, my body thrills to its rituals like a drunk hearing the clink of ice into a whiskey tumbler. With Cassius armored and ready beside me, I feel infused with the luck of House Mars, sixteen again and preparing to steal the enemy standard.
We take our places at the starboard door and he pats my back. “Nut to butt, Bellona. Don’t be shy.” The jump light turns red to yellow.
“I’d rather not.”
“Cassius, we rehearsed this—”
“Yet my objections remain. If anything, you should hop on my back. You look like the warning advert for street drugs. No offense.”
“It’s Howler protocol on lateral pair-jumps. If our equipment fails, you and I can’t get separated,” I say. I shove the traction gun into his hands. “Now get on my back.”
He climbs on my back, muttering.“Let’s go to war with the Reaper of Mars, I thought. Truly, I envisioned something far more glamorous.”
Aurae triggers the doors. The faint iridescence of the pulseField is all that separates us from space now. We are close enough to distinguish viewports and doors in the metal landscape of the dockyards. With danger ahead, but my life in my hands, I come alive again. Feels good to have my boots unstuck from the mud.
I steel myself and jump.
The dockyards roll beneath us as our initial push carries Cassius and me toward them. Then the velocity we inherited from theArchimedessends us laterally along the curve of the great eastern construction crescent. As we float above the dockyards, it’s like watching the construction process in reverse: First we pass over destroyers and torchShips, complete and lacking only paint. Then we see ships without guns, then without hulls, then without engines, until finally we pass over machines welding vast sections of durosteel for the superstructures of warships.
Workers, as tiny and numerous as ants, crawl along the surface of the warships and dockyards under the gaze of inanimate overlords—giant statues of deceased Carthii. When we reach the Vulcan Mouth, we passunder the gaze of Silenius and Carthus—colossal caryatids that glare at us from either side of the Mouth. These statues are the last sight retired ships see before they are melted down inside a furnace named for the Roman god of the forge. Silenius and Carthus, heedless of our pathetic mortal concerns, witnesses to the march of time, sneer past us toward the stars.
And then, fifteen minutes after our jump, we reach our fire point.
Careful not to throw off our trajectory, Cassius aims and fires the traction gun over my shoulder at the station. A counterforce exits out the back of the gun. We still spin a little until the payload locks on the surface of the station, and the line goes taut. The motor in the gun pulls us forward. On the surface, we abandon the gun and Cassius uses the base of a heavy railgun installation to climb off my back. He shot well. We’re only eighty meters from our target. We cross carefully, pulling ourselves along the toes of Silenius. As a battered Republic destroyer slides from the queue into the Mouth for incineration, we hop onto its hull. The incinerator doors close behind the ship.
“Fast-like…now,” I say and we race down the length of the doomed warship and jump off its bow toward the vast aperture that waits beyond the incinerator to consume the liquid metal the warship will soon become. A wave of heat chases us into the aperture, down its huge umbilical, and into a grim processing center where vast cubic trays wait for the liquid metal. A Red foreman in a mech-suit turns our way, but we’re already gone and into the station through a pedestrian walkway high above.
—
The Carthii’s philosophy of order is simple. They believe in an iron rod of discipline held by a velvet, scented glove.
Dockyard workers who obey their Carthii masters are given many delights, including twenty-three delirium arcades for the pleasure of their coveted Greens. We target an arcade located on the thirty-seventh level of the eastern construction spindle. The arcade is thick with humidity, and the lights in the ceiling cast a dim indigo glow over the rows of delirium pods.
Our abrupt entry, and the sound the Brown janitor’s body makes as he hits the floor, draws the attention of the arcade’s admin, a tall androgynous Green with a cruel, pale face. They turn from their route through the rows of delirium pods to see a shadow leaping toward them.Cassius takes them down hard with a knee to the sternum. By the time I make it over to them, he’s holding their body, now limp as a wet towel. The shock of the mild collision killed them.
“Sorry,” Cassius murmurs. “Not used to this high gravity.” He drops the human towel. “So fragile.”
“We’re looking for an architect or a fulgur bellator. Delta symbol with three lightning bolts. Try not to kill them.”
We split the pods, and I go down the rows peering at the blank, pale faces for the right tattoos that will find Sevro’s cell and lead me through the doors blocking my path to it. Hardwired into the experiential pods, the Greens’ reveries are relayed through small holograms over their heads. More than half the Greens partake in sexual simulations and are fit with codpieces to catch the byproduct of their pleasure. I stop and feel my gut churn at the horror bathing the face of a highly decorated fulgur bellator—a lightning warrior. A hardy Green bred to be paired with Gray squads in the field to enslave or neutralize enemy electronics, his body is thicker than most of his colleagues, and his predilections far more gruesome.
