Sensing they are now the prey, the other two cheetana abandon their hunt and sprint west. It won’t matter. Atalantia sets off in pursuit. Her huntmaster, a grizzled Gray with keen falcon-mod eyes, spits and revs his gravBike.
Black and white tents waver atop a nearby plateau, a source of laughter and music. Atalantia invited her closest friends and allies to enjoy the hunt before the summit. Instead of lounging in the tents with them, I start up my own bike, apply my ointment, and fall in with the procession of supplicants to follow the Dictator’s hunt west.
Two hours later, I’m sweating like a pig under the North African sun while my betrothed guts the last of her three kills. The Mediterranean might lie just sixty kilometers north, but none of its cool breeze reaches the rocky North African plains. The heat is punishing. The golden bowl is growing hot in the sun and heavy in my hands. Tharsus’s head has become very popular with the flies. I’m the last supplicant to have his audience.
After years in the Belt, Earth’s gravity is a boot on my being. Atalantia knows it. My shoulders ache, and my blood feels thick as mud. Seemingly unaffected, Atlas squints up at the sky from his place in the shade. At first I think the rangy man is inspecting the siege of Luna in the obscure distance. But no, he’s admiring the glint of the Twins of South Pacifica—two elephantine orbital railguns that the Republic scuttled when Diomedes seized them months ago. He feels me watching him and his eyes shift lower to three small gray octagons floating in the blue. WarBastions descending from orbit. They’ll be bound for Asia, and then on to join the siege of stubborn South Pacifica. These craft are stamped with Bellona eagles.
I look back at the railguns, and wonder why Atlas shifted his eyes.
The cheetana’s double-jointed legs twitch as Atalantia skins it. Trained by her mother to hunt, Atalantia is at home field dressing her kill. She usually prefers hunting in their estates in the Rockies, but those mountains have yet to be pacified. Atalantia tugs off the last of the cheetana’s fur and tosses it to a lancer, a surly young Falthe, before opening its gut to heap organs onto the dirt.
Atalantia wears a traditional Carthaginian hunting tunic of turquoise linen and skipper boots. Her godwood bow and golden quiver hang from a knot on the nearby acacia tree, where a male Pink nymphyte cradles a tray of refreshments in his muscular arms.
“The head,” Atalantia says.
I bring the bowl forward and open it. She gives Tharsus a glance and makes a small sound of a pleasure before giving it to her houndmaster. “For the dogs.”
One of her lancers takes the bowl from me and pours water in it.
“I’ll make Africa pristine again,” Atalantia says and peers out over the plains and wipes sweat from her brow. “Humans can pollute the other continents. My engineers say it will take two years to remove all the rubble cities. Three to prune the populace. Ten to pick up its trash. I’ll make this my home again. Like it was before the disease that is Darrow. New Sparta will become the capital of Earth.”
“Who will serve as ArchGovernor?” I ask.
“Scipio au Falthe, of course,” she says, sparing a smile for the Falthe lancer. Like most of his kin, the son of Scipio looks made for one thing—frontal assaults. “I’ll be busy on Luna.” Ajax’s meeting me on the tarmac suddenly makes sense. He is not happy here.
“Not Ajax?” I probe.
“No.” Her eyes flick to me, dangerous, measuring. “The only forces Ajax controls are the ones I deign to give him. Scipio has seventeen legions, by comparison. After Mercury, I need the muscle. It will take time for my new crop of Grays to mature. I have forty legions back-ordered.”
The numbers are so casual and so elite I feel dazed. I have the Praetorian Guard—just over forty thousand—and two more house legions of fifty each. That’s it.
After angering House Carthii, Atalantia must bring her other allies closer, especially now that the fate of the dockyards is in question. Earth has barely fallen and already its continents have been divided up between Atalantia and her allies like pieces of a cake. With Earth’s populace to replenish her legions, in time her stranglehold on the Core will be insurmountable. I hope Valeria au Carthii is as eager to work with Horatia as she was with me.
“The future for the gens Falthe looks very bright indeed,” I say, wary of the small talk.
“As my favorite Roman strawberry once said, ‘No friend ever served me, and no enemy ever wronged me, whom I have not repaid in full.’ ”
“And Ajax? Most would say he’s done more to retake Earth than the Falthe. How is he handling the disappointment?”
“Poorly,” she admits. “His time will come. But could you imagine a man less fit for the duties of a governor? All passion, no tact. He has none of my ability to multitask. None of Atlas’s subtlety and prudence. Or your precocious charm.”
She returns to her work and pivots hard to business. “Tomorrow, due to the debacle on Venus, it is necessary to consolidate our holdings. I plan to announce my intent to invade Luna with an Iron Rain built around the Falthe legions—it’s what they owe me for the restoration of their lands here on Earth and the governor’s chair.”
Restoration of their lands. Half of which they stole when they slaughtered the gens Thorne at my grandmother’s final gala. “When will this invasion commence?”
“Six months from now.”
I laugh, thinking it a jest. It’s not. “That long? What about Mars? If Darrow makes it back…”
She shrugs. “My lads are hunting him. We’ll either kill him in the journey back or hang him on Mars where Nero hanged his Red bitch. I broke his spirit on Mercury. His sun has set.”
From anyone else except Atlas, it would sound like bravado. But this is Atalantia, the only person to have actually beaten Darrow in a fair fight.
The cheetana’s liver flops out of her hands into the dirt and rolls sideways so that it rests against her boot. From nowhere, flies descend to beset the purplish organ. She looks up at me. “You seem eager for a military action. So, I will give you one that’ll make Ajax weep with envy. You will fall on Luna in the vanguard with Scipio and his children, at the head of your Praetorians. You’ll get that auctoritas you’re so desperate to have.”
She’s playing up my rivalry with Ajax on purpose, but that’s not all she’s doing.
“The Rim will be furious with me,” I say.
“Yes, and they’re already angry with me. You and I are to be united in convenient matrimony, eventually. They should be angry at you too. We must stand as one against our rude kin, or they’ll think they can push us around. I thought you’d be pleased.” Atalantia pouts. “The Citadel of Light will belong to Gold again. The home of your ancestors. Your shame will be ended in a glorious Rain.”
“We should be invading Mars,” I say. “That is the logical strategic choice.”
“Strategic,” she mocks. “Oh, tell me more about strategy.”
“If we take Mars, the war is over,” I say. “Is it not?”
“Atlas, educate this puppy.”
“Mars is a Gordian knot,” Atlas explains. “Winning orbit will be difficult and costly. The Ecliptic Guard is good. Well equipped. Well led. Julii and both Telemanuses are top notch astral tacticians. As is Oro, their Navarch. Meanwhile, Phobos is nearly impregnable. Without Phobos, a siege of Mars is impossible, leaving a Rain the only option.