I glance up past the waves of assault ships coming down at the mauled belly of theLightbringer. My flagship and captain have done their job and dropped their cargo. Time for Pytha to let the others through. If they are coming, that is.
If they aren’t, we’re dead, and in the moment that is all right.
Then Ajax pulls me down from the antenna. “You want to make a sniper’s day?” he snaps and curses me with a litany of phrases I’ve never heard before.
Rhone radios the breach is ready. With Ajax I rush to its edge. It is twenty meters wide. Helmet says three hundred meters deep already. The geyser of debris unceasing as level after level depressurizes. The clawDrill is already out of sight. Its demonic light throbs far below, promising death or glory. The hair on my arms stands on end as an energy field activates. Glancing up, I see Phobos’s main shield has come back on, cutting us off from support. My stomach sinks.
A Praetorian shouts a warning and points toward the pyramid looming over our landfall—Bastion One—where scales of light appear on the dark surface of the fortress. From the scales, tiny humanoid shapes emerge. They are tiny only because we are so far away.
“Drachenjäger,”Ajax murmurs over the com.
More scales glow on the fortress as a dozen more garages open.
My voice is eerily calm. “They’ll sweep down the pyramid and hurl us off this moon. If they take our landfall, we’re done before the main wave can land. We’ll be cut off inside.”
“Not our job,”Rhone says.“This isn’t the Ladon. Trust your guard. Our objective is down there.”
“Waiting on you,dominus,”Demetrius says and jerks his head toward the breach.
Ajax gives me a nod.“Let’s go make peace.”
Already I hear the cool litany of centurions over the com as they assess the new threat and prepare to rebuff the Drachenjägers. I gaze one more time at the far-off machines. They’ve begun a disjointed lope down the pyramid’s slope, building speed as they come in rolling waves of steel.
I contemplate when, years from now, I will sit in the Palatine garden and review all the fair things my peace has wrought, and I dive into the mouth of hell.
25
VIRGINIA
War Prism
One of the manylessons I learned at the Institute is the higher your rank, the less war is about courage or discipline or mud or blood, and the more it becomes a game of accounting. Usually it’s about food, fuel, and weapons. To defend Phobos, I invest bodies and resources like a Silver portfolio manager. Minimum cost, maximum profit. That is the game.
Victra, Niobe, and Char must handle the fleet. Phobos is my charge. If it is lost, so are our docks, our ability to replace our lost ships, and our ability to defend orbit. Mars will then be strangled. Not today, not tomorrow, but slowly and then surely, when they are finally able to use the moon to launch a Rain at the planet itself. We thought that the Rain would be today. We were wrong. So many of us were wrong. Nothing to do now but fight.
The crown on my head is a prism that breaks down the chaos of war into comprehensible information. It cocoons me in battle. The crown can monitor and manage up to a hundred and eighty engagements at once. Knowing my limitations undershoot the machine’s, I hand off forty of these engagements to Nakamura and the Nucleus’s staff.
Center in my field of view is the ever-shifting 3D tactical map. It shows the wormlike progress of the clawDrills through the top tiers of Phobos. My legions rush to head them off.
Our Bastion-based defense system was built so that the Bastions could be reservoirs of reinforcements able to direct troops to any breach in their sector. But with the clawDrills bypassing the Bastions and ourten-deck security layer—some of the drills have penetrated as deep as fifty decks already—our system is being pushed to its limits. No—it has been circumvented completely.
In just the first fifteen minutes of the assault, I’ve nearly emptied Bastion One’s reserves. Of Bastion One’s three legions—a hundred and fifty thousand Reds, Grays, Browns, and a few loyal Obsidians—all but several thousand have already been divided and committed.
The first legion makes contact with the enemy thirty-six levels down. The four centuries I tasked with heading off the drill at the tramway are impeccably on time. They fire shoulder-mounted rockets and destroy the drill as it passes through the level.
The drill burrows halfway into the floor before collapsing sideways. An armored capsule affixed above the Helldiver cabin bursts open and berserkers pour out. That’s new. A Gold is with them. The Red Legion centuries open fire. Then Praetorians pour through the smoldering breach and all I can do is send reinforcements.
Sixteen more units make contact with Lune’s forces in the next minute. The close-quarters fighting is bitter. Though outnumbered, Lune’s Praetorian vanguard is armored heavily enough to reduce almost every fight to melee chaos. Yet our numbers are making up the difference. If at the same time Kavax can keep the enemy on the surface from entering their breaches on the decks, we will destroy Lysander and his Praetorians once and for all.
With no time to micromanage each individual engagement, I give suggestions on the fly. A flanking maneuver to a centurion defending gun controls, a maniple formation to a Legate on deck thirty-three. Moments later though, I circle back to see the centurion dead, the Legate sealing the breach with engineering teams. I redirect the Legate to the next breach, three levels down.
I must trust my ground officers. My most important function is arranging for and massing reinforcements where they matter most. I triage based on a culmination of factors: the importance of each clawDrill’s objective, the likelihood of preventing the enemy from reaching the objective, and my overarching strategy of containment.
The strategy is working. Lysander has overreached.
Fierce and disciplined as the Praetorians are, with Kavax delaying their second wave on the surface, they’re outnumbered nearly everywhere. I’ve managed to mass legions in strategic areas to oppose theirprogress and swamp their flanks. Fifteen minutes in, more than half of the clawDrills have been intercepted and destroyed by ground units. I may be the only one who sees the order in the chaos. Meanwhile, the squad coms are overwhelmed by that chaos.
“Fuuuuuuuck…what the fuck was that?!? Get the fuck down, Corran. What the fuck were you thinking? Did anyone see where that came from? Where the bloodyhell is Horrow? Need to call this shit up! Need heavy armor.”
