I swoop down on the pack of Obsidians just as they track me from the ground. I shoot one point-blank and snap my whip around another. The third thrashes as Cassius’s blade punches through his back. The one I stabbed in the throat in the air finally lands with a thud. I fly upward immediately, dragging the Obsidian my whip ensnared by his leg. I contract the whip into a blade two hundred meters up. The razor slices through his armored calf. Released, he plummets down. I follow and use his mass to conceal my descent.
The wounded brave windmills haplessly at me as he freefalls. I stay just out of his reach but close enough that his friends on the ground don’t see me coming until it’s too late. I veer off my cover just before the brave impacts the ground.
My trick didn’t fool everyone. Something blurs toward me from the left. An impact rocks me. My vision flickers black. I wake a half second later, needles jolting through my body. Rail slug. Huge one. Must have hit my pulseShield. A dent the size of an egg has made a home in the left pectoral of my armor.
Furious at the dent in my new gear, I look for someone to kill.
“Two o’clock,” Cassius calls. I track him in my helmet’s rearview camera feed—a blur of gray metal tearing toward me like a bus. I wait, boost up with my gravBoots, invert, and cleave the Obsidian’s head down the center as he passes under at what must be sixty kilometers an hour. I revert, land, and flick the blood off my blade. It freezes in a long strand and shatters as it hits the ground.
“Engines hot! Engines hot!” Cassius calls.
I turn to see two surviving braves retreating onto one of the transports. They open fire on me. I activate my aegis and it shunts power from the pulseFist to form a blue shield on my left arm. I buck as the rounds pound the barrier. The ship takes off and just before the door closes, Cassius gives a boost from his gravBoots to land like a grasshopper inside. The doors seal behind him and the ship’s engines groan as it gets airborne.
Shit.
I burst into the air, pursue, and land on its hull before it gains enough velocity to outpace my boots. I stab my razor into the hull to gain traction. Walking like an old man with a cane, I make slow progress toward the cockpit. The transport gains altitude rapidly. I hack off its coms array as I pass. The antennae pinwheels toward the shrinking ground, black but for rivers of magma. Dark clouds whip past, stained red by the transport’s external lights. Just before I reach the cockpit, the transport bucks. I’m caught so off guard I lose my grip on my razor and slam into its top gun turret.
I’m dazed. Falling. Spinning like a leaf through blackness and clouds. I arrest my fall with my boots, gain my bearings, zip out of the murk of the clouds, and see the transport to the south carving a gash of light into the darkness as it falls in a nosedive.
By the time I catch up, the transport has crash-landed at the foothills of a volcano range. Not knowing what I’ll find inside, I land on the top hull first to retrieve my razor. I say a silent prayer when I find Bad Lass right where I left it—half-stuck in the hull just shy of the cockpit.
Thraxa would have killed me if I lost her family blade. I jerk it out and walk back along the top hull to the ramp. I hop down just as Cassius stumbles out. He almost takes my head off with a blind swing. I deflect his slash and call out his name. He realizes his mistake, booms a laugh, and embraces me. Helmet to helmet. “Gorydamn. Gorydamn. You weren’t exaggerating. Those crows can fight. But man…Vulcan himself would stroke his loins to this armor.” He runs his gauntlets over the scored, blood-spattered gear.
“Idiot.” I shove him. “You almost got yourself killed.”
“Now, now. I just wanted to see the Reaper in an open field,” he says. “The verdict is in. You’re a menace to savage and civilized alike.” I pause, reflecting back on the battle for the first time. It’s been years since I felt in the flow like that. I grin ear to ear despite myself. The training with Cassius has brought my spark back.
“Are you injured?” I ask.
“Concussed, certainly. So, don’t shove me again. One of them got me with a hammer.”
“I saw. It was a big hammer.”
“Right. Like, what’s he trying to prove? Is my armor prime?”
He turns. It’s shockingly only scratched. I look at the dent on mine. That’s not fair. Then I remember the civilians he risked our mission for.
I head into the hold of the transport, expecting the worst. The dim interior is filled with cages. The captives meant for gods know what are not dead from the crash. They cough behind filthy nanoplast barriers, huddled together in fear, droopy and sedate from the shabbiness of the cage’s oxygen filters. Several of the Pinks have broken their legs or arms in the landing. They cry in the arms of Green architects. I feel sick at the sight until I realize they are not crying in horror. They are crying in relief. I didn’t help Cassius to save them. I helped Cassius because I didn’t want him to die. And he would have died, for strangers. A font of respect and love for the man grows in me. Sevro called him shallow. He is not. Not by a longshot. He sways a little at my side. “Yes. Certainly concussed. But not a bad bill for a good deed.”
“Not a bad bill,” I admit. “Not a bad bill at all.”
“What you said to Diomedes…” I turn, already wondering how we’ll evacuate the civilians. His helmet is close to mine. He was listening, then. “What was all that?”
“Just a theory.”
Then the waste rumbles behind us, and I turn to see our actual bill.
55
DARROW
Demigod
FOUR DARK TRIANGLES RACE toward us over the volcanic plain. They are Republic assault dropships painted with the ancient Obsidian runes of the Allfather. Before I can hail the Archimedes the jamming arrays that jut from their bloated underbellies like stingers cause our long-range coms to die with an insectoid screech.
“Oh, Jove. That’s not good.” Cassius’s voice is filled with static.
“I did tell you they wouldn’t be alone,” I reply. This is not what was supposed to happen today, so of course it happened. I actually laugh. Maybe it needed to happen for me to realize I can’t keep running. I have to take a stand somewhere. Like Cassius with Sevro. Am I so afraid of my own braves, and the guilt they make me feel?
When the attack ships are the size of thumbnails, Obsidian aerial cavalry deploy out of their bellies. “So what is it then? Fifty for each of us?” Cassius asks.
“Looks like.”
“And they’ll be just as good as the ones we just fought?”
“Better. See the dropper with the golden ram banner? That’s Jarl Skarde’s.”
“Jarl Skarde? Who is he?”
“One bad son of a bitch,” I reply. “We do not want to fight him.”
“Right. Do we have that choice?”
“You did. We don’t.”
“Right. Where the Hades is the Archimedes?” Cassius asks.
“Picking up the others soon as they’re done with the omega torch. Then coming to us,” I say. “If it didn’t run into its own trouble. With Lyria at the stick—”
“She can get it here. But she’ll be too late,” Cassius says and glances back to the hold. The civilians may not be able to see the Obsidians, but they can hear the war drum beat blasting from the ships.