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You and the mechs must wait for the shield, or you’ll be torn apart from space,” I tell him. “Kavax.” “I have waged war before,” he says and kisses Sophocles on the mouth. “I love you, little one. Be brave for Virginia. She has the beans now.”
“Look after him, yes? He’s grown tender in his old age.” Sophocles watches Kavax go and begins to shake. I can’t watch.
When Sophocles begins to howl, I know Kavax has left the Nucleus. Part of my heart marches off with him. I stuff the jellybeans into the pocket of my armor that holds the splinter of the gallows.
All I can do is go down, down fast as I can to where death waits with its mouth open and its teeth gnashing the men ahead.
Under my boots a Green woman holding a glass of whiskey stares at me through the cracked duroglass of her living room window. The plants in her apartment start to shake, but not from me. Her eyes meet the dark glass eyeholes of my helmet. In the reflection of the glass between us I see my second wave descending behind me.
“Win your battle. We’ll handle ours.” I’m beginning to realize we won’t, but amputations on the field are best done without consulting the patient.
Clear the Nucleus of all nonessentials. Tell me when our window is about to close. Then we drop. And someone please secure that fox.”
“Lionheart. I have broken your champion. Now, I come for you.”
They will compete against one another to get me. We are not them. We are a pride. We kill together, we work together, we survive together. They came for a hunt, but they forgot: hic sunt leones.” “Hic sunt leones!” they echo and we pound metal.
Many would have been Augustan legion. My father’s own. He didn’t suffer fools. Neither does twelve years of war.
Holiday guides the drone back up the shaft and lets it get extra snoopy. It coasts toward one of the cold spots. Closer. Closer. A laugh echoes in the shaft. The cloak melts away. A bull’s head emerges from the shadows in front of our distant drone. “Found you,” says Apollonius.
I reach for my concealed razor. My reach draws his full attention like blood draws a leviathan. He turns, a mass of terror and metal. “All hail Lionheart,” he purrs.
“Sefi is dead. My…heart is dead. I am dead.” Certainly not lacking in drama, this one.
“What is in it for my brothers?” “If we escape, freedom. If we don’t, a good death.”
“I want armor.” “Fresh out. But the halls are dark and nearing a hundred degrees.” I poke the ghostCloaks with my toe. “I hear you used to call that hunting weather in the Rat War.” He considers for an exhausting moment, then looks up with a terrifying smile.
GhostCloaks are worthless when the enemy has thermal optics. But in the dark when the air is as hot as the human body, the last thing anyone wants to encounter is eighteen fresh Obsidians with razors and nothing to lose, all of them chosen and led by Valdir the Unshorn.
He didn’t say much else that night. Neither did I. His eye was on the past and all he’d seen. Mine was on the future and all we yet might.
“They will mourn later. For now it is enough they know their brothers would smile to see them living. So they smile for their brothers, for they had a good death. Later they will miss them. Later they will mourn.”
She told me to tell you something.” He smiles. “Do not worry for her. Pity them.”
“The edge of glory cuts both ways. Condolences.
All that for a slice of moon and a grind? If that’s not a loss, what do you call it?” The old soldier frowns. “War, dominus.”
The battle for Phobos is turning into the type of battle students of history shake their heads at. It is pugilism without any other recourse, as uncomplicated as it is brutal, measured less by the inventiveness of clever commanders and more by their willingness to sacrifice men, and the willingness of those men to be sacrificed.
I feel the gulf between my concept of leadership and Lysander’s growing. Lysander may promise a new age, but he’ll sacrifice a generation to get it.
They clutch my hand till their knuckles go white and tell me he will return, and with him he will bring dawn for his friends, and judgment and doom to the enemies of freedom.
His pulseArmor, riddled with field patches and pressure seals, is that of a man who’s faced weeks of corridor fighting and emerged with a reputation for luck and leading from the front. His face is a mirror of mine, haggard from strain and sleeplessness. This is not a spoiled, entitled princeling. This is the last of Silenius’s blood. A man who has come to see if he too can conquer.
I remember a more bookish boy. A more prudent boy. You’ve learned to gamble on shock.” “I have. Your husband is a stern teacher.”
“I doubt you had Darrow’s full attention. You must wonder what will happen when you do. Will you measure up?” Lysander meets my tone. “I am here. Above his planet. Talking to his wife. Where is he?” “Oh, he’ll turn up when it’s most inconvenient for you, I’m sure.”
When I gave Darrow his razor after the Institute, I had no idea what a symbol it would become. He was mocked for its curve by Tactus and his fellow lancers. They were too embarrassed to fence with him. Lorn wasn’t. Twelve years later, every child knows its shape.
I nod to the statue of Darrow to the north. “Have you seen it up close yet?” “Not yet,” he says. “But by week’s end, we’ll have pushed you off the pole, and I can take a closer look.”
“Pay special attention to what’s in his hands. It just looks like a sphere from far away. It’s not, at least in its details. It’s hundreds of manticores, hydra, skulls, hammers, eagles, a few Poseidons, mermaids, centaurs, and crescents he has taken from the prows of Gold warships. No room to include any from ships smaller than a destroyer-class. You understand? That is consistency against intense competition, Lysander. For twelve years now. One battle does not make you a lord of war.”
“Fine. By the balls then,” I say. “I beg your pardon?” “You don’t have me by the throat. You have me by the balls. You can wrench and twist and it will cause me terrible agony. But in the end, they are just balls, and I am a woman, so I will go on, enduring without my balls and I will pester you with death by a billion cuts.
I am a Sovereign, who will delegate to people more suited for tunnels and darkness and the horrors that happen there.” “Pegasus Legion is at less than half strength. You’d waste them here?” “No. Rat Legion. I believe even you know them.” By his expression, I see their reputation does proceed them.
“Remember, you live for the fallen, for at your word they ran to the grave.
“When did you get such balls?” “When my friends started dying for me.”
“When I first met you, I thought you were a conniving little shit with too much ambition for his own good. You’re all those things, but all this isn’t for just for your own good. Is it?” “Only in my weaker moments.”
Then my husband’s face appears on the viewscreen above the menu, and I stare at him like he is the first man I’ve ever seen.
The dark one. Not in features, but dark in his energy. There was a man who needed no witnesses to burn.
His eyes are soft, yearning, and do all but reach out across the void and embrace me. “Lo, Mustang.” His masculine voice stirs up the silt of love, and the part of me that’s been dormant since he left awakens. “Lo, Reaper,” I whisper.
“Our boy?” he asks before our prearranged test. I find that touching. He couldn’t wait.
I was so angry at his departure I’d nearly forgotten how comforting he is as a confidant. No judgment, no bullshit, just boundless competency.
I reassure her with a smile. She watches me without speaking, and I feel the tender beat of her heart against my chest.
Without her hologram, the room is darker and so am I. I linger in the silence, because as long as I linger, as long as I do not look up and see where her image once was, she does not feel so very far away.
The true home for a slave is in dreams. Except on Mars where slaves make dreams real. I always found that a beautiful thought.”
My eyes fix on his family phrase: Lux Ex Tenebris. Out of darkness, light. The words of the enemy hang over my head, and I feel purpose in a way I haven’t in some time.
We do not live in the shadow of Rhea. We make our own light.”
I put a hand out. “Rhone.” He is a little slow to help me up, but with his aid I gain my feet. “A Lune never stands without his guard,” I reply. “So it will be as it always was.”
Those asteroids that host actual cities are so rare and estranged from civilization, they are precious, the last lamps before the abyssal dark of the Gulf.
The last time I was so far away from the sun was when I was sailing for Luna aboard the Morning Star. Now Lysander is sleeping in my old bed on the Morning Star, and I’m sleeping in his bed on the Archimedes.
I don’t want to be a pessimist. But what if Virginia made up this fleet so you wouldn’t go on a suicide charge only to get nabbed by the Raa trying to get home?” “You mean what if she’s just preying on my hope and lying to prevent the enemy from obtaining a political and propaganda weapon that could drive a stake through the heart of Mars?” I ask. “Namely my head?” I sip my caf. “Then I’d say she’s doing her job.”
“I wouldn’t want to marry a Sovereign.” “I didn’t. I married Virginia, and she married me. The Sovereign and the Reaper, they’re the shadows that come with us.”
