Pytha rushes to Cassius and gingerly unlatches the mask. His face is a bubbling mass of angry, swollen flesh. Like a wax figure strayed too close to flame. Bit by bit the swelling subsides under the anti-inflammation pack that Pytha applies.
When she pulls the pack away, our handsome friend is gone, replaced by a thuggish visage with a primitive forehead, a bulbous, veiny nose, chipped ears, and a slack mouth with engorged, lazy lips. The Peerless Scar is gone, recessed into this new Bronzie visage. Pytha wipes tears from her eyes.
She looks up at me in recrimination and jerks the smelling salts out of my hands to crack them under his nose. “You’re prime, dominus,” she says to him, cradling his head and wiping the vomit from his face as he comes to. “Easy as sin. It’s all over now. It’s all over.” He sits up with her help and together we watch out the viewport to see the destroyer opening its docking bay to swallow us whole.
I STAND UPON MY TOWER as a hard rain falls.
Before me, the steel skin of the Eternal City yawns into the night. Amidst the reaching towers and bloated stadiums and buzzing complexes lie dark pools of shadow where the Jackal, and the years of war that followed, left their mark. Now, with the radiation scrubbed and pulsedomes removed, arthropodal construction ships from Sun Industries drift with lazy purpose there, hauling and ferrying workers and metal.
Hyperion may be rebuilding itself, but the southern cities were all but destroyed by the Ash Lord’s forces under his mad Minotaur, Apollonius au Valii-Rath, before the latter’s capture and imprisonment in Deepgrave.
My people do suffer. But Dancer’s false peace is not the answer. In my youth I was consumed with the fever of war. I don’t feel that fever now. I only feel the cold weight of duty, and the fear of what it will do to my family. A ship glows as it approaches the top of my tower and sets down on the landing pad.
A thickset Silver man with a bald pate walks down the ramp. He wears a high-collared white velvet jacket. The eyeball of a Gold glints from a ring on his heavy hand.
“Quicksilver,” I say. “Thank you for coming.”
He grunts and shakes my hand. His lone companion, a Sentinel drone no larger than a child’s skull, floats behind him, chrome hull shimmering in the rain. A red eye pulses in its center. I watch it warily.
“I watched the socialists tear off your crown. That was an embarrassing spectacle,” he sneers. “Matteo’s men tell me they’ve concluded the debate. The Obsidians abstained. Just sat there. Caraval and the Coppers went with the Vox. Your arrest warrant will be issued within the hour. They’re voting on the armistice soon.”
“Then you know what happens next.”
“History is a wheel. And all mobs are the same. Full of small men with big appetites. Only way they grow is by eating men like us.” He squints at me. “You could end the Vox Populi tonight. Storm the Senate. Put them in irons.”
“They’re still my people,” I say defensively.
“Do they know that?” I don’t answer. “The Vox Populi are a cancer. There’s only one way to deal with cancer. Cut it out. I told your wife that years ago.”
“We agreed to demokracy.”
“Yet you’re here. Aren’t you?” he asks with a laugh. I haven’t missed the hypocrisy. “Change isn’t made by mobs that envy, but by men who dare. Fitchner knew that. And so do we. Even if they spit on us.”
I look down at the bald man, remembering the first time we met on Phobos, how much I hated him. He’s a strange creature. Full of malice and selfishness and rigid ideology. Not a man I thought I’d ever trust. But he pulled himself up from obscurity on sheer will. He founded the Sons of Ares with Fitchner. He rebuilt the Republic from my wars. Without him, Luna would be a land of craters and ash.
“You’re leaving. Aren’t you? Good,” he says.
“Good?”
“What help is the Reaper in a cage?” he asks, nodding up to the sky. “We need you in the wild.” I didn’t ask his advice, but it reinforces my conviction all the same. He was Fitchner’s friend. I wish I could talk to the man now. Just once. Would he agree with what I plan?
“I need your help.”
“You know I always help my friends. Probably why I keep so few of them.”
“You might want to hear what it is first.”
“You’ll never make it to your ships in orbit with the Wardens after you,” he guesses. “You need one of mine.”
“I need the Nessus.” He flinches. “And I need it to look as if it’s been stolen.”
“Why the Nessus? What are you planning?” He grunts at my silence. “Never mind. I’ll put it in dry dock for repairs. You know where it is.”
I nod. “Thraxa is already waiting in the dock.”
“So you knew I’d say yes.”
“I hoped.”
He laughs. “Bring my ship back in one piece, eh? She’s Matteo’s favorite.”
“Sir,” a concerned voice says behind me. I turn. My archLancer, Alexandar au Arcos, Lorn’s eldest and brightest grandson, stands behind me. He’s a smirking prodigy. Blade-thin with long white-blond hair and fair skin. Standing no higher than his breastbone is another of my lancers, my niece Rhonna, Kieran’s headstrong eldest daughter by his first marriage. Twenty, with a buzzed head and a flat nose. She’s only been a lancer for a year, but is eager to prove herself Alexandar’s equal.
They duck their heads against the rain as it soaks into their black Pegasus Legion jackets. Alexandar eyes the drone behind Quicksilver with disdain while my niece eyes the man himself. “They’re all here,” Alexandar says.
I look back at Quicksilver. “If the Vox find out you helped me…You might be safer on Phobos.”
“And watch as the mob steals my towers and my companies? I have security teams for a reason. I rebuilt this moon. My fight is here. Shame. You’ll miss my birthday.”
“Here’s to making the next one.” We shake hands and he departs.
—
“What you’ve heard is true,” I say.
Thirty-seven Howlers stare at me through the smoke haze from their glowing burner tips. A savage’s miscellany of psychopaths and hooligans, my pack is a scattermash of rejects that Sevro and I have collected over the past ten years. After losing twenty on Mercury, our official number is one hundred and eleven, but most have been dispersed throughout the Republic by Sevro to carry out my directives. Those who do not have homes on Luna reside within the Den, an ink-black skyscraper I liberated from the ownership of the Shadow Knight. Holiday nods to me from the back, the last to arrive. She looks like she’s been drinking. Sefi sits to the side with our ten Obsidians. With her senators abstaining from the vote, I wasn’t sure she would come.
“What you talkin’ ’bout, boss?” Min-Min, my munitions expert, says through her nose. Her metal legs are up on the table. Sunken Red eyes watch me neutrally from her dark face. Her dusty mohawk is flattened to one side, and the haggard lines of her cheek are deep in the low light. “This emergency meeting shit’s a bit gritty, doncha think?” Her robotic wolfhead ring taps against her beer bottle. “We just got back.”
“What’s he talking about?” Victra asks incredulously. Her long arms are crossed over her pregnant stomach and her jagged hair is pinned back by a clasp. She looks furious. “Do you actually live under a rock, Min-Min, or just look like it?”
“Oh, slag off, poshy. I was knee-deep in the Mass. Had this righteous Obsidian brute sandwiched between me thighs.”
“Have you not looked at the news at all today?” Pebble, one of my oldest companions, asks. Her fleshy cheeks are flushed from her hasty arrival. She and her husband, Clown, were halfway to a Mare Vaporum resort for a vacation with their children when Sevro called.
“Naw.” Min-Min sighs. “I’m analog, baby. Last thing I need to bloodydamn see is more sensationalist smut about psycho slags on Mars raping and burning. Doesn’t do me well.” She smooths her mohawk. “Not at all.”
Sevro throws his datapad at Min-Min so hard she almost takes it in the face.
She catches it and turns it over, muttering under her breath. Her eyes grow wide as she sees the headlines. “Bloodyhell.”
“What I would like to know is which one of you snitched?” Victra asks.
“Yes, please stand up so we can stab you in the spleen,” Sevro says. “Only way Dancer could have been tipped is if one of you chatted about the emissaries. If you talked to a whore, a docker, your bloodydamn mother, now’s the chance to own it.”
No one stands.
“I trust everyone in this room,” I say, knowing it’s what they need to hear. But it’s not true. The leak had to come from someone in this room. Sefi? She did not exactly support me. Is she really so tired of war? “However they found out about the emissaries, it wasn’t from one of you. You all know by now of the peace accords that the Ash Lord has requested. The Senate will soon agree to an armistice, a temporary cease-fire to negotiate the terms of a possible peace. I believe this is a ploy of the Ash Lord.”
“Damn right it is,” Sevro says.
“He knows of our division at home and is using it to gain time to regroup his forces around Venus. You all know what I fear by now.” I pull up a holoMap and walk along it, dragging my fingers through the asteroids. “I fear dragons. The Raa are coming. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But one day Romulus will attack. We must consolidate control over the Core before that happens. If we leave the Ash Lord alive, we will be caught between two enemies. We will not win.”
“They’ll never fight together,” Victra says. “They might hate you, but I know Moonies. Even the hostages Octavia used to keep are born hating the Ash Lord. Never forget. Never forgive.”
“They do not have to fight together,” Sefi says. “They only have to fight against us.” With the heavy casualties the Obsidians faced on Mercury, I know she doesn’t relish that prospect. Then why didn’t her senators vote to support me?
I continue. “The Senate is evidently concerned that I am a liability to the peace process. They have called me a warmonger. As of now, they say I am no longer ArchImperator. Soon, I believe, there will be a warrant for my arrest.”
“Might already be one,” Sevro mutters under his breath.
“Dancer’s a bastard…” Rhonna says. When she lived in the hidden city of Tinos, he was like an uncle to her. Her fists clench in anger at the betrayal.
“No. Dancer is a good man. He’s doing what he thinks is right with the tools he has,” I say. “It’s our turn to do the same.”
“What are your orders, bossman?” Min-Min asks. “You hiccup and the whole Seventh will storm the Senate and crucify any Pixie who looks at you funny.”
“Damn right,” Clown agrees. “The Senate is more corrupt than the Syndicate. I say you go in there and dissolve it. Have new, clean elections.”
“And what?” Pebble asks her husband. “Darrow rules as an autocrat in the meantime? Don’t be ridiculous. The Republic’s done if that happens.” She looks to me plaintively. “Can’t Virginia do anything? Surely she won’t let them place a warrant for your arrest.”
“Of course she can’t do anything,” Victra replies. “Majority rules unless she uses Emergency Powers. But she does that, and the Vox Populi will cry tyranny and vote for impeachment. You seen the streets lately? The mob will back them, especially if they think they can end the war. No one cares about Venus.”
“She’s the Sovereign,” Rhonna says.
“Which has one-tenth the power it once did. The silly lion helped write the laws that stripped the Sovereigncy of so much of its power. I told her not to….” Victra sighs. “Idealists never learn.”
Holiday stirs uneasily at her place on the wall. “You can’t really be thinking of violence, Darrow. If you mobilize the Seventh, then the Home Legions will be ordered against them.”
“By whom?” Victra asks. “What general would go against us?”
“Wulfgar,” Holiday says. “And he’ll be the one coming to arrest you, Darrow.”
“Patriotic idiot,” Min-Min mutters. She turns to Sefi. “Can’t you rein him in, big lady? Aren’t you their queen or somesuch?” Sefi doesn’t even look her way. Her eyes are locked on me.
“Please,” Victra says. “Half the people in this room have their faces on coins. The rest have statues. Whatever army they send against us will become our army. One look at Sefi and Darrow and they’ll piss their pants.” Does she not see how Sefi is watching me?
Victra looks up at me with a grand smile. “Darling, I say we all attend the peace talks. Make it a bit of a party. And once that sanctimonious prick Dancer is put in a cell, we give the Ash Lord our diplomatic reply and send him the head of Julia au Bellona back in a gorydamn box, mouth stuffed with grapes. Or her eyes stripped out and replaced with snake heads. Or Dancer’s testicles, whichever you find more thematically appropriate. We can vote! ’Tis a demokracy, after all.”
She smiles at the heads nodding along with her, but more than half in the room look nervously at their hands and each other. They’re hesitant to go against the Senate. No one wants civil war. Holiday gives voice to their dissent. “I’ve followed you through hell, Darrow. Don’t ask me to follow you through this. I believe in the Republic. We have to put our faith in something. If you march on the Forum tomorrow, you march without me.”
“Loyalty gone just like that?” Victra asks. “A mercenary after all.”
“And I thought you was hard, Holi,” Min-Min says. “Pfah. You’re getting peaceful in your menopause.”
“Shut up, Min-Min,” Pebble says. “She’s right.”
“That’s a load of shit,” Sevro snaps. “If they try—”
“Enough,” I say, seeing Sefi’s growing displeasure at the bickering. “Holiday is right. Gold fell because they let themselves be consumed by civil war. I won’t let our Republic fall in the same way. I know how fond we are of escalation.” Grins from some of my longest-serving Howlers. “But not this time. The Seventh stays in their barracks. We’re not disbanding the Senate. The peace accords will continue. They’ll take months.”
“So you’re, what…” Victra says, looking to Sevro, then me, aghast and more than a bit disappointed. “Going to let them arrest you?”
“No, love,” Sevro says softly, looking back to me. Our conversation on the shuttle to the Den was short and to the point. “Not quite.”
“The Ash Lord is no fool,” I say. “Dancer and the Vox Populi are being played. He wants me to use the Seventh. He wants me to dissolve the Senate and seize power. It would fracture the Colors and allow him to pry them away, by offering stability.”
“That’s a stretch,” Victra says.
“I know him. I will not break the Republic. And I will not be a prisoner. Which is why I am leaving this moon tonight.” They look to each other in confusion. “The question is: who’s coming with me?”
Sevro steps forward to stand at my side even as the rest of them look at me blankly.
He did not agree with my plan initially. He wanted to stay on Mars and dare the Senate to arrest me at the center of the Seventh Legion barracks.
“To where?” Holiday asks.
“You’re running?” Victra almost spits.
“I’m not running. But if I tell you, then you are party to conspiracy,” I say. Not to mention, the plan’s details will leak like word of the emissaries. I look at each of them, wondering again who betrayed me. “You will be outlaws. Some of you have doubts about this. That, I understand. You followed me to Luna, to Mars, Earth, and Mercury. I will not pressure you now to compromise your oath to the Republic. We are family. We will survive this. But if you think your duty is here, it is time for us to part. Vale willing, we will see one another again soon.”
For a moment, no one moves. Then Holiday walks around the table to stand in front of me, her face wracked with guilt. “I’ve followed you everywhere, but I can’t abandon the Republic.”
“I’m not abandoning it,” I say.
“I know you believe that, sir, but I’ll remain behind. You
may not think you’re starting a civil war. But there will be hell to pay. My Sovereign will have need of me.” I feel no anger toward her despite the accusation in her voice. We shake hands.
“Watch over my family.”
“With my last breath, sir.” She thrusts her fist into the air in the Rising salute. “Hail libertas.” And in a smaller voice, “Hail Reaper.” She departs the room.
Sevro sneers at her departure. “Any other cowards?”
Seeing the doubt Holiday’s departure has brought into the room. Colloway xe Char, my best pilot, sighs and lights a burner. His slender body is laconic, his skin a deep ebony and covered with cerulean astral tattoos. He blows a smoke ring, then stands sleepily into it, brushing his blue-black hair from his eyes. “I didn’t eat cockroaches to sit at home while you have all the fun.” The pilots of Warlock Squadron follow him, including Min-Min. My lancers, Rhonna and Alexandar, join her, followed by a flood of others. Clown can hold back no longer. He bursts to his feet.
“I’ll go with,” he says. “Darling, you stay with the children.”
“Like hell,” Pebble says, joining him, though I see the doubt in her eyes.
Sefi and the Obsidians are all who remain.
“Sefi, are you with me?” I ask.
I see her answer before she gives it. Unlike Wulfgar, she doesn’t worship at the altar of the Republic. She carries the welfare of her people on her shoulders. When Ragnar died, that was her inheritance.
Slowly, she stands. “I care nothing for Venus or Mercury,” she rumbles. “They are not worth Obsidian blood. We have carried the Rising on our backs, and for what?” Her eyes scorch the room. “For Gold to still sit on high? For the rest of the Colors to hate us, call us monsters? For us to speak, and for you to hear nothing?”