I turn on him. “Really?”
“Really. Three. People are wise to the Willow Way, and personally I don’t think it maximizes your potential. Four. You need your killing confidence back. You need a top-tier razormaster. You need me. After all, steel sharpens steel.” I lean back. “Don’t give me that face.”
“What face?”
“That constipated wargod face. Minotaur messed you up. But I think we can make you even better than you were at your prime. If you let us.” He puts his hand over my mouth. “You say one word about the gala, I will turn this ship around.” He takes his hand back, wary. I cross my arms, tight with pride. I wince from two cuts Apollonius gave me.
“If you wish to be repaired, you must first be broken,” I mutter.
“What?”
“The eleventh understanding.”
He rolls his eyes. “When did everyone turn into a gorydamn philosopher?”
“When we started losing.”
“Then that’s a yes.”
“That’s a yes.”
“Good. We start tomorrow.”
I look down at my bandages and wince.
PART II
RAMPART
The alarm was soon carried to the city, and when they heard the war cry, the people came out at daybreak till the plain was filled with horsemen and foot soldiers and with the gleam of armor.
—HOMER
12
LYRIA
Truffle Pig
THE REPUBLIC LONG-RANGER LOADS his multiRifle and readies his suit for space. I shadow his movements, lagging behind him less by the day. This will be the sixty-ninth asteroid we’ve searched, and though this is today’s first reconnaissance it already feels we’re searching in vain for the laboratory that created the tech that infests my head. The parasite, the compass that brought us to this sector of the Rim, has gone silent.
When Pax sent me off from Mars, he told me his theory that the parasite tech in my head was damaged and attempting to guide me back to the place of its creation to seek repairs. He talked about a lot of things he said he’d learned from inconclusive intelligence reports: a secret laboratory. Fringe scientists. Links to Sun Industries. For good or ill, I believed him. I believed the urge in my gut that brought me to sector 3401 of the asteroid belt. But with the parasite four months silent—save for the mind-melting headaches—I’m beginning to realize trusting someone too young to even have pimples yet might have been a mistake.
Idiot, me. I was so desperate to repair the parasite and tap in to its power to help Volga that I believed him. Not that I’d know how to even find her. She might be with the pirates three sectors over. She might be on Pluto. She might be dead.
Only the routine of the search, the sharpening of my skills day by day, keeps me from eating holes in myself over thoughts of my failure. It’s been six days since the last battle we saw between Republic and Rim ships. The Republic didn’t win, and the long-ranger squad’s resentment—like my anxiety—is only getting worse.
I’m no heavyMetal Red like Fel, the ranger team leader—who is half-bionic. Nor am I an Orange like our crusty mechanic, Oxis. Nor a Blue like sweethearted, air-brained Xaria, our pilot—a fawn-like woman of middle age. They want to be on Mars when it’s attacked, not here following a truffle pig whose nose is clearly broken. But it’s my duty to my dead ones to learn all I can from the rangers, even if I annoy the living shit out of them. What I learn here will help someone who needs it later.
So when I feel doubt tugging me down into the churning grief in my gut and the guilt that the rangers are wasting their time snooping asteroids out here with me, I think of the mud in Camp 121. Of my sister’s corpse, wearing her new shoes. I think of snow. The cold I felt seeing Ulysses nailed to a tree. I think of Volga surrendering herself to Fa, out there somewhere imprisoned by the mad warlord who sacked Olympia and killed Sefi the Quiet. I think of all my bloody uselessness, how I couldn’t stop any of the bad shit from happening. That makes me angry. And anger’s all the fuel a Red lass needs to keep going.
“Airflow, check,” Fel rumbles.
“Airflow, check,” I reply.
“Seals, check.”
“Seals, check.”
“Gustpack, check.”
“Gustpack, check.”
“Ranger One ready.” He waits for me. “Truffle Pig?”
“Ready.”
“Pilot, piss the presh.”
The airlock vents its air to create a vacuum. Fel’s hard crimson eyes are hidden behind his green visor.
As an elite Republic long-ranger—a pirate hunter, peacekeeper, investigator, instigator, and sometime scout for the Ecliptic Guard—the Belt is Fel’s natural habitat. He was born here in an asteroid carbon mine, hard and rough as uncut diamonds. When I wonder how the Republic ever fought Golds, I look at Fel.
“Still feel like you’ve got a screwdriver in your eyehole?” His accent isn’t Martian. Belt Reds stretch their vowels like taffy.
“More like a pencil now,” I say of the headache that lances from my right eyeball, through my brain, to the base of my skull. “Won’t slow me down.”
“Best not. Need you fit, Piggy. We got six more ’roids to hit before bunk. Gotta pick up the tempo if we can’t narrow the search, elsewise we’ll be here till me balls hang past me knees.” His voice quiets. “Are you sure this is the sector?”
“No, I’m not sure. I told you that. I’m not sure of anything. The machine stopped guiding me months ago.”
Under the depressurization lights, the faded symbol on his durosteel shoulder—a white arm holding a white torch—is stained a muddy red. Unlike my EVO suit—a pressurized personal space apparatus—which covers me toes to cowlick, Fel’s suit leaves his limbs free. He can afford the vacuum exposure since his arms are metal, and his legs too from the knees down. Eight digits on each foot and hand would be the envy of any Helldiver.
“You give it any thought?” I ask.
“Hm?”
“My callsign. What we talked about last night in the lounge.”
“Aw. Naw. Yer stuck with it.”
“Ain’t exactly flattering, is it? Truffle Pig.”
“Ain’t that all you’re good for? Sniff, sniff, looking for treasure in mounds of the Solar System’s shit,” our Orange mechanic, Oxis, says over the com from the machine room.
“Right. My fault for not turning the monster machine that crawled into my head without my bloody volition into a perfect compass for you on command. I’m done answering to Truffle Pig.”
“Lock it up, Oxis,” Fel says to the Orange. His voice carries no pity for me but no malice either. “Lyria, you’re raw as a baby’s throat. No wings on your shoulders. No wolf on your chest. Skipped the schools, and we don’t care if yer the Sovereign’s stool pigeon, ya don’t get to skip the shit test. Least, not until you start picking up a scent, hear? We all done our jobs. You need you to do yours.”
“I’m trying.”
“Trying won’t keep the Golds from the gates of Mars.”
“Are all rangers such slaggers?” I mutter.
“Lass, I’m a dove compared to the hyenas out there. Me friends are dying back home, and I’m out here with you, sniffing. Any other would toss ya out the airlock, call the hunt closed, and get back to real soldiering before the war’s lost.”