“Yes. Can’t be just you and Sevro making the plan every time. I’m more than a pretty face and an excellent pilot. The Raa needs to see this, Darrow. He deserves to see this. I know you think he’s your enemy. But I was too, once.” I nod, thinking. “Was I so wrong to bring him? To not want him tortured? I know I’ve missed the war, but maybe that’s a good thing. You and Sevro are stuck in a brawl that you can’t look up from.”
“Maybe,” I offer him. “But you should have asked, Cassius.”
“Oh, like Sevro asked to torture him?”
So much for my authority. How is it easier to control an army of millions than my two best friends? I frown. Is Cassius a best friend? Weird how comfortable I am with the thought.
Aurae’s gravBike groans to a halt behind Cassius. Diomedes looms behind Aurae in the bike’s second seat. Even with her slender lines hidden by the bulk of her pulseArmor, she looks like a child sitting in front of a golem. Unarmored, he wears a boxy EVO suit. His face is hidden behind the dusky visor. His hands are secured behind him to the bike.
“Your idea?” I ask Aurae of Diomedes as she joins us. It’s clear she has a deep emotional connection to the man. She admitted as much to me after Sevro and Cassius fought.
“No. This was all Cassius,” Aurae says. “While Diomedes was one of my masters, you seem to forget that I chose to leave him. I am a traitor to him, in more ways than one. He has not spoken to me. Only to Cassius. I said we should follow your orders, Darrow. Diomedes may be a man who cannot tell a lie, but Cassius really has no idea how dangerous he is.”
Cassius presses the issue. “Diomedes had kin here, Darrow. If you let him search for them, he’s agreed to give you his parole.”
“Aurae, you know him best. Will he keep his parole?” I ask. “I know you’re on our side, Aurae. I promise I will not think your judgment compromised.”
“He is a gentle, sensitive man—” Cassius and I both look at the hulking beast sitting chained to the bike. His list of wartime heroics sings a very different tune. “He is also fair, kind, and honorable. But I have never seen him at war. And he has never seen his home destroyed. I cannot say what he will or will not do. Especially if he thinks you are involved in this.”
“Me?”
“The Raa considered you a grave threat, a new age Hannibal. Now many of your old braves are here.”
I wince at that.
“He spared my life, Darrow,” Cassius says. “He doesn’t like me. He did it because I fought with honor.”
“Yeah. But I’m not you,” I say. “I’m certainly a main war objective. And you always forget. Golds have different rules for Golds than they do for Reds.”
“Darrow, look around. The Rim is out of the war against Mars,” Cassius says. “This is worse than anything you ever did. If we show him that…Well, we could do worse than having a helpful Raa out here.”
Cassius really is trying to be a moral knight. If only the world cared. Yet I am tempted. Torture did not work on the man, so perhaps this is the path to understanding Kalyke, and maybe more. Aurae says, “I’ve known Diomedes for thirteen years. You knew his father Romulus, yes?” Her expressionless helmet looks back at me, but her face shows on my HUD, captured by the cameras in her helmet.
“I know his uncle far better,” I say.
“Diomedes could be like his uncle, his father always said. But Diomedes wants to be his father. His mother, Dido, led the Dragon Armada. She is likely dead. His kin were in Sungrave…to break his honor, his parole, would be the ultimate dishonor to the dead. And he loved them more than anything.”
Apparently bored of eavesdropping, Sevro jumps from a ledge above and lands on the bike just in front of Diomedes. He squats there for a moment then jumps back to us and lands in a flurry of sulfur. “Said he gives his parole to me. Let’s stop wasting time.”
“You sure?” I ask.
“He’s in an EVO suit. I’m in this. He slags around, he’s chowder.”
I nod to Cassius to get Diomedes off the bike. Aurae begins to show me on the map where the access to the family tunnels lies. I stop her mid-sentence. She hasn’t yet seen Sungrave itself. “We won’t have to use the family tunnels,” I say. “The front door is wide open.”
* * *
—
Sungrave was once a city that demanded awe. Centuries ago, Akari au Raa carved dragons into the mountain range that hosts the top levels of the city. He did it with orbital lasers before his Reds started to burrow into the moon itself. The city rose from the frozen desert as proof of the ingenuity, grandeur, and determination of House Raa, and it stretched beneath the desert, deeper and deeper, as testament to the centuries of prosperity overseen by Akari’s ancestors. Like an iceberg, most of it lies unseen beneath the surface. Even now, fallen, dark, its dragon statues broken and radiation slithering from their shattered bodies like blood, I feel puny in its shadow, and even lesser in the shadow of Fá’s accomplishment.
Many believed Sungrave impregnable. I know I did.
Set within and beneath a mountain, the citadel of the Raa was powered by the tidal heating of the moon itself and linked through tunnels to subterranean greenhouses. Even with a half-strength garrison, it could maintain its shields against orbital bombardment and feed its people for years, while its natural features and tiered defensive fortifications made it all but impervious to ground assault. Supposedly.
It would take days to scout all the entrances into the mountain city, but we haven’t the time. Besides, nothing except our party moves on the south-facing slope. Not at the main breach, nor amongst the collapsed towers or twisted gun batteries, nor even down below where the sulfur waste meets the great and undamaged ground gates into the mountain.
Entering the city via the breach—a smooth tunnel forty meters wide littered with broken war machines and frozen defenders—is like descending into a necropolis. They died in many places, the defenders of Sungrave. In the hallways, in great grottos once rich with vegetation. In fallback bunkers defending civilians, and in tramways and broad avenues beneath vast domed ceilings glowing with radiant fauna and waterfalls flowing from underground rivers.
First it was the urban phalanxes who died in their gray and blue armor and then it was auxiliaries in gray and blue livery and then the citizenry in the simple cotton or wool vestments of the hierarchy. Sometimes the bodies are heaped in public agoras. Sometimes they are pinned to the walls above empty bottles of spirits. Mostly they lay where they died, which was either in flight or cowering in redoubts or trying to stand firm against the tide.
The pulseFields that provide the atmosphere to the city are mostly intact the deeper we press into the city. We doff our helmets. The air is breathable, cold and thick with the noxious, sweet smell of death. With Sevro scouting ahead, we reach the Spine without encountering a single living being. Usually there would be scavengers.
Wide enough for a hundred men to walk abreast, the Spine is a grand stone stairway that links the levels of the subterranean city together. A black stone arch carved with scenes from the Raa family’s history has been decorated with a new and odious embellishment: the decaying head of a giant dragon. I smell its stench even from the floor.