“Hic sunt leones!”they echo and we pound metal.
—
The hallways are a blur of tension and silence punctuated by random and intense kinetic violence followed by retreats, mad dashes, and weird refrains where hiding in lavatories or strategy rooms and even a kitchen become moments of extreme dread. It is a dance, and the enemy is finding we’re as hard to pin down as a greased eel.
But sadly, they aren’t a pair of hands grasping at us with their transports pouring troops. They’re about to become a very big net.
My twenty-eight Lions are tougher, better equipped, better trained, and better led by Holiday than the capable but standard Votum legionnaires. Apollonius’s men, on the other hand, are Martian veterans—hard bred and battle-scarred. And for them, hunting me is personal. Many would have been Augustan legion. My father’s own. He didn’t suffer fools. Neither does twelve years of war.
No matter how good my Lions are, they will die if we don’t get out.
I won’t be killed, though. I’ll be chained and dragged through the streets in Lune’s triumph.
The Votum Greens kill the power first. Our running firefights flare in the darkness. We hit like lightning, cover our retreat, and disappear into the station time after time, always trying to find a gap. We hit when we have to, we hide when we can, but mostly we run, phasing in out of sight in our ghostCloaks.
More and more we run.
Running on local power, the doors still function, and I retain control of those with my Sovereign implant. We split up half a dozen times. It confuses their pursuit, but they start to get wise. Cut off vertical shafts. Form a hard-deck on lower levels we can’t pass. Deploy hall-spanning particle shields, traps, auto cannons of their own. Mines.
We turn into a hall, running from Apollonius’s closing horn, and a Lion simply disappears in front of me. Like he didn’t even have armor. I don’t even know what killed him. The last thing I see is one of his legs tumbling down the hall.
Panting a few minutes later, I kneel in the darkness of a rec room forRed Legion I, where jellyfish writhe in an aquarium. The jellyfish are red, grisly like that poor dead Lion’s leg. His name was Arminius. He liked garments. He wanted to design them. He was going to use his pension to start a clothing line. I was going to give him seed money. He didn’t know.
“Movement in hall,” Glaucus says and recalls his drone. “It’s Holiday.”
Holiday and six Lions slip silently into the rec room. “Did it work?” I ask.
Smoke slithers from Holiday’s armor. “They bought it. Votum thinks we’re two levels up, heading east toward the secure trams. Drones say shaft D is clear.”
“And Apollonius?”
“His men are mostly tied up with Red Legion in the battle for Sector Two. We got a coms officer to talk.” I don’t ask how. “Officer said Kavax is alive. Apollonius broke his back then sent him to the rear as a prize.”
He’s alive. Thank Jove. I breathe out in relief. A prisoner, but alive.
I try to set my worries away as we wait for the second team I dispatched to return to the rec room. When they do return, they carry two domed backpacks. “Cloaks and razors?” I ask.
They nod. “Twenty and fifteen. Some night optics too.”
“What do we need those for?” Holiday asks.
“Insurance,” I reply.
The intercom crackles.“Augustus, this is Cicero au Votum. You are cut off from your army. You are surrounded. There is no escape from the Bastion. Neither is there shame in surrender. Indeed, there is more dignity in that than in being hunted down and killed like an animal. Apollonius is stalking you this very moment. Lune is not Atalantia. He has agreed to recognize the Republic as a valid entity. Should you surrender to me, you will be afforded all the rights due your station as a head of state. Your men will likewise—”
I click my tongue twice and my Lions move out.
Cicero is getting worried. So am I. We haven’t seen Apollonius himself in an hour. Never a good sign.
The halls are quiet, dark. Our wounded don’t slow us yet. We have five so far. Two from Apollonius himself, and he didn’t even manage to close. The wounded are fueled by the cold fire of the Republic’s best emergency combat cocktail: Mjolnir-6.I’ll stay sober. Mjolnir-6 bluntsempathy. If I lost that, I’d send what was left of my bodyguards to create a distraction so I could slip out by myself. For the Republic.
That’s what Adrius would do. Or my father. Not me.
Not today.
We move slow and careful, and manage to reach one of the many entrances to the tank garages in which shaft D is located on level thirteen without encountering the enemy. We’re so close. Holiday turns on her ghostCloak and slips forward into the darkness with three Lions. I hear the slur of a railgun. A gurgling. Holiday comes back with a red knife. Drones were right. Clear except for a few Votum techies trying to hack the gravLift’s controls to better move troops.
I give the nod.
