“We don’t have armor,” Cassius says. “We’ll be like peaches into a woodchipper when they hit the Carthii.”
I try to remember a line fromThe Path to the Valethat might console us but I’ve got blood crusted in my nostrils, on my legs, on my ribs. My only hope is that it is Sevro who blew the other bomb, and that he’s got a plan. I don’t. All I can do is wait for the opening and be ready.
“Be ready,” I say to Cassius.
“For what?”
“I don’t know.”
With Apollonius at the lead in his horned helmet we’re headed for the life-support nexus for this part of the station—which the Carthii will no doubt try to seize with their best men. My view is filled with the bobbing of metal shoulders and the glare of alarm lights and the glitter of hall cameras.
Twice the armored column has to divert because of a bulkhead that refuses to open. Suspicious. I peer past the armored shoulders and heads when we come to an abrupt stop in a corridor ten paces wide. The Grays twitch, restless. They’ve already taken their battle drugs. The column bends out of sight behind us with the curve of the hall. At the fore, Apollonius bellows in impatience at Greens in his command hub. The column about-faces to retrace its steps but the bulkhead at the rear must have closed too because the about-face goes nowhere. Centurions shout down the line for a breaching team.
“It’s him,” I murmur.
Vorkian shouts for silence. Up ahead, Apollonius puts his ear against a wall to listen for something. He backs away from the wall.
“LeechCraft!” he shouts. “Search for teardrops.”
The call echoes down the line behind us, out of sight. Cassius swallows. Teardrops. That’s what they call the first hint of molten metal on the wrong side of a leechCraft’s drill. A Gray triarius is the first to spot one. Cassius might have said something clever if he had his razor. But with his hands bound behind his back and only a prisoner jumpsuit between his body and what’s about to happen, he just looks at me.
“Peaches. Woodchipper.”
The column shifts with anxiety. They’re not in a good position should something go wrong.
Apollonius roars for the breaching team to hurry up and clear the bulkhead blocking us in. I search for some obvious salvation—a hatch opening, a plasma charge eating through the ceiling. Some sign of Sevro. Nothing. It’s enemies all the way to the bulkhead in front, enemies all the way to the curve of the hall behind. The corridors were designed to trap invaders. I’d know because I studied this place with Sevro for years. You don’t want to be trapped in a hall like this.
The breaching charges detonate against the bulkhead at the fore but fail to penetrate fully.
We’re not going to clear the hallway before the Carthii hit us.
There’s only one choice: hit the boarders in the teeth hard as possible.
Apollonius comes to the same conclusion.
Centurions bark orders and legionnaires grind into position around the breaches. The Obsidians’ grip on me tightens. Two more drill marks appear on the corridor’s left bulkhead halfway down the formation. Shit. Recognizing the danger the second and third breaches pose, Apollonius calls his Golds to the front. They open fire on the obstructing bulkhead with their pulseFists until it glows orange. They plunge their razors in like picks and hack holes in the thick metal, but they’re not faster than leechCraft drills.
Apollonius is a good enough commander to know what’s about to happen to his precious personal legion. You push other legions around like blocks, but your own you use as a sacred scalpel, delicate and sharp and fast, to find the arteries of the enemy. His precious scalpel is about to be shoved into a woodchipper along with us peaches.
A great roar comes from the man as he tries once more at the door before abandoning the lost cause and pushing himself to face the nearest breach. “Stack on breaches. Divide by cohort. Rank by heavy shields, triarii, velites. Crows and Peerless stack in pods for melee. Coriolanus, front cohort. Vorkian, rear. You have the prisoners. I have center.”
Phalanxes form before the breaches. A bulwark of energy shields, a hedge of glinting, armor-boring spears backed by a forest of rifles.
The Obsidians drag us through the legionnaires to the rear. They’re still manhandling us back around the curve of the hall when we pass the mouth of the last breach. I see down its molten throat all the way to theCarthii leechCraft where metal figures gather behind a glowing shield. A lone berserker, released before the rest, sprints down the throat toward us. In the heat-warped air, he is a mirage of terror. Naked, heavily tattooed with the eel-green ink of the Carthii gladiatorial clans, and raving mad. Vorkian stops, aims her rifle into the breach’s throat, and fires a single, perfect shot. It takes the Obsidian between the eyes. He falls short of the breach.
Such is the heat, he catches fire.
A sacrifice to the gods of death. Then the shield at the Carthii leechCraft winks out and the metal stacked behind it begins to move. RamLads, delirious with pharmaceutical courage, armored thick as rhinoceroses, rush down the throat with an oceanic roar. Vorkian and our Obsidian handlers drag us on as the Grays open fire.
I twist to see a ramLad stumble out the mouth of a breach into the hall. Bent forward like a golem trudging into a storm, he soaks up the fire, takes one last step, and collapses in a rent heap. In his wake come berserkers. This wave of genetically enhanced killing machines crashes upon the wall of stony Gray veterans and turns to red foam. The second wave breaks from torpedo rounds that turn them to human pyres. But their momentum, added with that of the unnatural delirium in the beasts behind them and the Carthii tolerance for high casualties, creates a surge of mass that cannot be denied.
Expensive Obsidian slaveknights in cerulean armor, heavy shields, and short spears form the third wave. Trampling over the corpses of their spent brethren, they crush into the first Grays and hack at the shield line as the spears of the second line impale them. With a cry nearly inaudible amongst the explosions and shrieking, Apollonius and his heavy Gold infantry charge into the Obsidian flanks at each breach. The corridor fills with smoke and noise and death.
My eardrums ache. Bullets hiss. Shrapnel pings off Vorkian’s helmet, slashes across the bridge of my nose, and peppers the armor of the Obsidian handler behind me. Cassius ducks. Down the hall, the battle takes on the sound of hundreds of spoons caught in an industrial fan. Something slams into the wall next to my head and ricochets, taking along a chunk of my scalp before embedding itself in the eyehole of one of my Obsidian handlers. His grip slackens. Before the second Obsidian sees his fellow teeter down, I slam my shoulder into the warrior. Off balance, he stumbles into the smoke.
I crouch, coughing, eyes burning. I can’t see Cassius. I can’t see anything but indistinct shapes and flashes through thick smoke. I go lower to find clear air for my lungs. A hand grazes my head and, finding no hair to grab, slides off. The dilation collar tightens. I can’t breathe. Blood sluices down my neck as the collar cuts into my skin. An Obsidian body lies on the ground nearby. I crawl to it and grope behind my back for his boot knife. I find the blade at the price of a few cut fingers. Fumbling, choking, I saw at the dilation bindings on my wrists until they come apart. My hands are free. Wheezing, I cut through my collar and suck down air.
Nauseated, vision swimming, I stay as low as I can in the smoke and search for Cassius. I see two figures staggering in an embrace, like lovers. One is Cassius. The other Vorkian. He’s headbutting her repeatedly. Unfortunately for him, she wears a helmet, and all Cassius does is knock himself out. He falls down into the smoke, but he bought us enough time. Vorkian reaches for the dilation-collar controller on the ground and I lunge up through the smoke to bury the Obsidian knife under her left armpit. I slam her against the wall and kick the controller away. I grab at her waist and come away with Bad Lass and Cassius’s razor before she disappears in the smoke and press of bodies.
