I duck down as high-caliber rounds buzz overhead. Bodies fall and tangle and climb and hack. I find Cassius on the ground and cut off his bindings. His collar tightened and nearly nipped an artery. I slap his face until his eyes open. He hacks for air. Blood leaks from his ears.
My hearing is shot. Everything is muffled, chaotic. Sounds come as if through water. I push his razor into his hand and signal him to stay low and follow me away from the breaches toward the closed bulkhead at the rear of Apollonius’s column. Crouching, razors in hand, we set off into the smoke.
Men have disintegrated into singular actions. An arm holding a razor rises and falls. A rifle flares. A helmet caves in from a powered boot. From the smoke, a Gold appears and points his pulseFist at me. Before he can fire, another man stumbles back into him. Then an Obsidian war-spear comes through his neck. I lunge forward and rob the dying Gold of his aegis.
I take point, aegis up, razor straight and on its rim, Cassius stacked behind me. We push toward the bulkhead like hoplites. Identity is lost amongst the chaos, the smoke, the screams. Two Grays fire at us. I takethe slugs on the aegis. The Grays shift their aim toward my unprotected feet. Cassius lunges over my shoulder with his razor. He spears the first Gray through the eye socket and ducks back behind the shield. I take the second between the clavicle and neck with Bad Lass then bowl him over with the shield. We push through the smoke, stabbing out from the cover of the aegis as we go until we’re stopped by the bulkhead at the rear of the Rath formation. It’s still sealed. Terrified men already hack at it with their weapons. More crush in behind us, pinning us to the bulkhead. Still more on their way, tripping, scrambling, desperate to escape the Carthii killers. My legs give out and I swoon in the press. I lose the aegis and my hands are so slippery with blood I almost drop Bad Lass. Cassius throws his shoulders into men until he’s able to pull me back up and shield me with his body.
Down the hall comes a muffled cheer. “Carthii! Carthii!”
They must have secured the breaches. According to Carthii doctrine, that means one thing: the Golds will be coming. Over the crush of dented helmets and bloody Grays I see the fear in Cassius’s eyes. Then the pressure releases forward as the bulkhead opens.
Pushed by the mass of men behind us, we spill forward. I fall. Metal heels stampede over my back. Something massive stomps toward me from the opposite direction. I look up to see the clawed feet of a starShell. The weight is swept off my back. A half dozen Grays slide down the left wall, their bones broken like kindling by the sweep of the starShell’s arm.
The starShell towers over me. It stands alone in the corridor, its canopy and shoulders crudely reduced to fit the tight confines. Its clawed metal foot stomps down to my right, then my left, until it straddles Cassius and me like a beast protecting its cubs.
The railgun in its left arm lowers, as does the giant pulseFist in its right, and from its cockpit, amplified by its external speakers, comes a bloodcurdling howl. Both of my eardrums rattle as it opens fire directly above us. I shimmy out from under the mech to see the pilot through the canopy. Under a bird’s nest of hair, a demonic, bearded face black with grease screams in the stuttered light of the starShell’s deluge.
Sevro.
I almost pass out from joy. Murderous glee shimmers in his bloodshot eyes. He shouts something at me and jerks his head to get behind him. Cassius and I don’t have to be told twice. We scramble behind thestarShell. Medical supplies and vacuum helmets have been taped to its back. Cassius strips them off. I slap the chassis. The starShell doesn’t move. I hammer at it again and again until Sevro finally takes a step back. Then another. Without breaking his stream of fire, he covers our retreat back down the hall. Cassius injects my neck with a battle stim and slaps resFlesh on my new wounds. The familiar itchy energy rushes through me. I wipe my bloody hands on my tattered jumpsuit and grip Bad Lass.
By the time we reach an intersection and get free of the line of fire, the starShell is spewing smoke. Sevro remains within it, unwilling to stop killing. He fires back down the hall even as its right leg is shot out. At the last moment, he pops the rear hatch and escapes out the back.
He’s dressed in battered scarabSkin. A trophy necklace of fetid ears hangs from his neck. I want to kiss him, hug him till his head pops off, but he’s all business. After two quick hand signals for us to follow and keep pace, he takes off at a run. We follow.
The Carthii invasion rolls on all around us. With my damaged ears, I feel removed from it. Battles thunder in the distance. Mechanized troopers clomp down hallways. Even with the stims, it’s all we can do to keep up. Cassius and I are a mess. My injured calf slows me. Cassius must have suffered a concussion because he can’t stop vomiting, even when Sevro takes us into a maintenance tunnel. More than a half dozen times Sevro slows to deactivate tripwires and improvised traps in the darkness. By the time we emerge into a viewing garden I have a clearer picture of Sevro’s stay on the dockyards. He must have escaped soon after his imprisonment and spent the past months waging a one-man guerilla war against Apollonius.
The tranquility of the garden is as shocking as the violence of the battle. Birds and purple spider sloths watch us from the garden’s trees as Sevro hands me his datapad. I dial in the fallback frequency to hail Aurae. When she answers, Sevro snatches the datapad away and strides up to the viewing deck window to peer into space as he talks. Outside Carthii destroyers and troop barges flow past, illuminated by the whitewash of artillery fire and the orange flames of oxygen burps from the station.
After a few minutes, Sevro signals us to put on our helmets. He takes a thin wire from a pouch on his kit and ties one end around a railing and the other around his belt. Then he extends a hand to me. I extendmine to Cassius. He shakes his head. He knows what’s coming. I insist and he takes it. Hands locked, Sevro guides us to the railing. Cassius and I lie down and wrap our legs around it. On his back, Sevro lifts his strange weapon, points it at the glass, waits, then fires until the glass explodes outward. Pressure gushes out of the viewing deck. Flowers, birds, sloths, and trees fly past. The pressure the room contained is limited, and the flow of debris soon slows. As the cold of the vacuum begins to drain the heat from our bodies, we release our legs and let Sevro push us toward space.
Sevro lets out the wire bit by bit until we dangle out the open window like a balloon on a string. The cold is total. My teeth chatter in my helmet. Explosions flash along the metal horizon. I lose feeling in my fingers and toes first. Then my legs and arms. A shadow falls over us. Sevro nods to me. Drunk from the effects of the cold, I let go of his hand and receive a push. I float away from Sevro. He goes the other way, back toward the windowless garden, where he releases the wire from his belt and pushes off to head our direction. He passes Cassius and me just as we float into a cargo bay filled with crates stamped with winged heels. TheArchimedes.
The bay doors of theArchimedesclose behind us. Pressure gushes back in to the hold but not gravity. I’m too cold to do anything but shiver and float with my hand locked around Cassius’s. I feel out of my body as Sevro strips his helmet and pushes us through the ship. When he finds the medBay he separates me from Cassius to secure me in one of the medical beds and drape a thermal blanket over me before taking off my helmet.
With Cassius still floating in the air behind him, Sevro shouts to Aurae. I can’t hear what. He looks back at me. His red eyes are shiny with tears in his grease-dark face. He lowers his forehead to mine and only pulls back when gravity returns. Cassius plummets from the air to crunch into the floor. He curls into a shivering ball. Sevro tosses a blanket at him and heads for the cockpit.
I lie there shaking, a smile on my face as the engines of theArchimedesvibrate and the ship accelerates away from the battle.
10
LYSANDER
Iron Fist
Imake my grand entranceto my party on a pegasus from Horatia’s private herd. Slipping off its back onto the top hull of theLightbringer,I greet Cicero and Horatia with kisses, Glirastes with a nod, my Praetorian Guard with a salute, and turn to address my waiting guests. Some are friends. Some are Atalantia’s creatures. Most are somewhere in between. All have come expecting to see me fail. They just might.
It is an accepted truism that in the Core only the Carthii build warships. Not the Votum. The Votum are fine builders, yes. But terrestrial builders. Simpletons in the sophisticated shadow of Carthii astral-construction supremacy.
Tonight we dash that myth. I hope. I have bet everything on it. The ship does look like a monster. It has no paint, and its hull is heterogenous and patched with the metal of ruined Republic ships. The front is ghastly heavy, but there are reasons for this. If it flies, that is.
The fire of braziers whips in the wind. The Golds gather in white furs and wear crowns of flowers to symbolize the planet’s rebirth. It is cold at this altitude, and it will get colder. The ship is the largest warship in existence. Eight kilometers long, 1.5 kilometers thick. It has not yet lifted off. But even lying on its side, our perch on its back provides a grand view of Heliopolis cupped between the mountains and the sea. The whole city is watching, and so are interested parties all across the Core. I lift my voice.
“My noble kinsmen, I am honored you could join me on thisauspicious day. When Darrow came to Mercury, he claimed to bring freedom. Instead, he brought death. Mercury was not the first planet to fall to the Reaper, but it will be the last.”
There’s a stir in the crowd as Tharsus and a dozen of his glamorous friends arrive late and very drunk. Indecorously, they chose gravBoots over the ivory skiffs offered to my guests. They crash down in a swirl of silks and scents and doff their military boots to pull out fur slippers. They do not join to listen to my speech, but instead head for the menagerie of carvelings near the bow. Tharsus causes a racket by teasing a caged manticore. Cicero raises his eyebrow at me, annoyed at the impropriety. I carry on.
“Mercury is no stranger to hardship. Closest to the bosom of the sun, only ingenuity and hard work have made her people prosper. I thank my hosts, the gens Votum, for their hospitality, but also for reminding me of those ancient virtues. Only ingenuity and hard work can beat defeat into victory. For over a decade this ship, once theMorning Star,was Darrow’s greatest weapon. He sailed it here to break Mercury. Instead, Mercury broke both him and his ship. Not content with that, Mercury then rebuilt his ship! And tonight it will set sail for the first time.” I lift my cup to the Votum. “Horatia, Cicero: from ashes, you craft diamonds. May fortune long favor your house.”
