“Unless she’s leading the Krypteia to us right now. You have to admit: even for a Raa hetaera, she does have a diverse collection of skills. Medical. Engineering. Not exactly the domains of a courtesan.”
My eyes narrow. “You’ve been talking to Screwface, haven’t you?”
He grimaces. “Man does like to talk these days. Sows doubt like it’s his job. Might do for you to check in on him?”
I don’t know if I have anything left to say that will pull Screw from his depression. A thought comes to me. Maybe he’ll be more receptive to Aurae’s book than I am. He’s a reader, Screw. I clap Harnassus on the shoulder and head for the door. I call back, “Cadus, if you thought Aurae was Krypteia, why’d you make her a lyre?”
Before she left with Cassius, Aurae would play her lyre and sing the songs of her spheres to the troops after dinner. Harnassus never missed a performance.
“It was for the troops,” he lies with a blush.
* * *
—
I tell myself I’m checking on Screwface to keep him straight, but it’s my own loneliness that inspires the visit. Of all my survivors, he is the only one who shares memories of the Institute. I just want a spark of our days of glory from an old member of my pack.
Taking two thermoses of the diluted caf from the processor, I grab my training pack and Aurae’s book from my room and make my way through the base’s upper labyrinth toward the coms chamber. I find Screw bathed in computer screens under thermal blankets next to his space heater. He looks more like an animated stack of laundry than the legend he is. It breaks my heart.
Screwface is a man uncelebrated by the public, because his sacrifices have always been in the shadows. Much to his chagrin. A lover of the high life, he envies the fame of Colloway Char or Sevro. When I met him at the Institute, he was ugly, lazy, and a freeloader. He is still a freeloader and would rather amputate his own testicles than pay for a drink. But with three years behind enemy lines and after being carved by Mickey and given a new identity by Theodora to infiltrate the Ash Legions, no one could describe him as lazy.
At first, he was delighted by his deep cover mission. Chronically insecure, when he emerged from Mickey’s recovery suite, broad shouldered, ruggedly Roman in the face, with a chin almost as fine and just a little larger than Cassius’s, I’d never seen a man finally so at home in his own skin.
“Fit, mate. I look bloodydamn fit to slag an entire ballet troupe. Bellona, what? Ash Legions here I come,” he’d said, striking an Olympian pose. He was nude. Epically proportioned. Theodora even applauded.
But now? Now Screwface is ugly again, and he hates it. When Heliopolis fell, he was scalped and lost a leg. He covers the livid scar that starts just above his eyebrows with a wool cap, but the base’s stores lack prosthetics, so he’s made do with a peg of plastic padded with packing foam against the stump.
My command has ruined the man. Twice. Bitterness seeps through his every word, but he was there for me in Heliopolis, before it fell. He helped pull me back from despair. So, I can stomach his bitterness. “Word from Bellona?” I ask, handing him the caf.
He doesn’t thank me. “Oh, we’re calling the Decapitator of Ares by his real name today?” He pouts. “Alas, no the Chin and the Siren are still wayward.”
“Do you always have to bring that up?” I ask.
“Aw, come now. Yesterday’s talk was so fun. You had many adjectives for the Feckless Quim. The Avian Turncloak. Even a few adverbs.”
“I was—”
“Bitter and drunk?” he asks. “You’re all wrath when you’re bitter and drunk. Honestly, I think this war would be won if you were that way the whole time, but then I fear it’d just be you and me lording over an autarchy.” He chuckles at his rhyme, his lingo inverse to his birth, which was low. “Let’s be candid though, everyone’s been bitter about Bellona their entire life. Handed all the cards, wasn’t the Putrid Adonis?”
“And misplayed them all,” I offer.
“Except that dimpled chin. Oh, the dew-dappled valleys it’s explored. My kingdom to be a hair on that mentum…”
I resist glancing down at Screwface’s very dimpled chin. Unlike the rest of us, he still maintains a clean shave.
“Anything on the sensors?” I ask.
“Nil, oh bald and bearded liege.” He cups both his hands around the thermos for warmth. The nails of both fingers are bitten to nubs. “Radar and lidar are still slagged. Tried building some filters to strain the soup—you know all this.” He chews on a caf stick, swigs his coffee, and cocks his head back. “Routine may be your sanity, but you’re driving me mad.”
“You haven’t left this room in three days,” I say and nod to his slop bucket. “Your decor is starting to look very Sevro.”
He looks around. “No jade. No golden walls. No silk. I’ve got about zero in common with that deserter’s den.”
“Screw, you know he did what he thought was right.”
Screw spits on the ground. “I spent three years amongst Atalantia’s sociopaths on behalf of the Republic while he was sucking on the tit of Gold royalty. Look at my reward.” He removes his cap to show his mutilated scalp. “While we died, Sevro ran home. And I’m here waiting for that Pink to lead the Dustwalkers right to us.”
“She’s something all right, but she’s not Krypteia,” I say.
He frowns. “Then what is she?”
I think of Aurae’s skills, the book, the way she watches me like a judge sometimes. “A friend, I hope.”
“Let’s pray you’re right. Because they’re out there, hunting us. They’ll want to cut your head off for destroying the Dockyards of Ganymede. You and Victra. And Dustwalkers never stop till they find their mark.”
I share Screw’s respect for the Rim’s stalker squads, just not his agitated tenor. It’d be almost ironic if they found us and dragged me back to the Rim to pay for my sins. But it isn’t because of them or Aurae that Screw shits in a bucket for fear of abandoning the sensor station. Neither is it because of Ajax au Grimmus, who came closest to discovering us when his destroyer, Panthera, prowled within fifty thousand clicks of us five months back. Rightfully, Screw is only afraid of Fear himself.
I sympathize, because I am too.
“Atlas isn’t hunting us,” I say. He looks up at me like Pax would when I’d wake him from a bad dream. “Our trail’s cold. In relation to the System, we’re smaller than a zooplankton on a krill’s back in all the seas of all the worlds put together. Even if Atlas doesn’t think we’re dead, he won’t waste time looking.”
“Not when he knows where we want to go, you mean,” Screw murmurs. Maybe that was the wrong conclusion to lead him toward. “Shit, boss. Even if Bellona does come back with helium…it’s a long sail home and we’re the bottom of the food chain. If the enemy patrols spot us…won’t be anywhere to run. Those Rim ships are faster than us. Not that it matters. Most of the lads and lasses think Mars has already fallen anyway.”
“I need you to stop encouraging them in their pessimism. You’re a Howler. The men look to you to set the tone. So do I. You’re the only other one here from the old pack besides me.”