“Legate Dunlo, those drills allow them to bypass the Bastions, and the defense levels. They will land north of the crater and south of Bastion One. They will chew through the starscrapers and the surface into the moon’s interior and Praetorians will pour in like water.
“It’s up to you and Red Legion I to stop their downward penetration before they get to the Core and the reactors. Make contact and kill those drills. Plug the breaches best you can. Hawk Legion and Haemanthus Legion will press in laterally from Bastions Two and Eight to reinforce and stop their lateral movement.”
“They’ll be able to put men on hundreds of levels from the drill shafts,” he warns. “I…don’t know if we can contain them.”
“Which is why we will also attack them on the surface at the breaches themselves. Tell your Drachenjäger commander that Kavax is on his way and will lead the charge.” Silence greets my announcement. “Go.”
With a salute, he storms away with his officers to join his legions.
Holiday returns to fit me in my armor. “Engineering, where are we on the shields?” I ask.
The engineer falters. “Ma’am…”
“Speak up, man!” Kavax barks.
“My Sovereign, I cannot give the order. Those are good men and women! If we don’t wait for the radiation to pump out, they’ll die!”
“Get those shields up, or go tell your family they will pay because you wouldn’t. We are here to do our jobs!” Kavax booms, then to all: “War requires monstrous deeds! If you cannot be a monster, then get out of the way!”
The engineering officer falters, unable to give the order, but I already opened a line to the shield rooms. They heard Kavax. A steady, distant voice replies.
“My Sovereign, that is a Lune out there?” the voice asks, a woman’s.
“The last one. And his Praetorians.”
“You need the shields up to attack them?”
“Yes. If they hold their landfall on the surface, their allies can pour in behind them. We need to wipe them from those breaches. Teach Lune’s allies the only thing here is death.”
The engineer on the line takes an unsteady breath. I can sense they are confirming with their colleagues. “The shields will go online in ten minutes. We will see to it personally.”
“Name? Rank?” I ask.
“Centurion Murani Legard.”
“Thank you, Centurion Legard. I hail your name.”
“Hail Lionheart. Legard out.”
In ten minutes, Legard will likely be dead. More martyrs for the cause. So many martyrs. I turn to Kavax. He is saying his farewells to Sophocles.
“When the high gates open, we’ll release the reserve ripWings. You and the mechs must wait for the shield, or you’ll be torn apart from space,” I tell him. “Kavax.”
“I have waged war before,” he says and kisses Sophocles on the mouth. “I love you, little one. Be brave for Virginia. She has the beans now.” He stands and hands me his pack of jellybeans.
“I wish I could go with you,” I say.
“Your value is here. You must guide the legions. Plug the holes in our defense.”
“Take my Lions from the hangars with you,” I offer.
“No. You will need them to reinforce the legions,” he says.
“I will see you soon,” I say and look for him to validate my hope, but the look he gives me is not that of a father to a child, not anymore. We are peers now, and we know we may never see one another again. I clasp his hand. “Good hunting.”
“Sophocles, stay. I shall return.” His men take a conical attachment off the back of his armor and hand it to my centurion Virgilus. “Look after him, yes? He’s grown tender in his old age.”
Sophocles watches Kavax go and begins to shake. I can’t watch. I turn back to the display and observe my legions making their way through the trams and sprint through corridors as I try to guess where the enemy will drill. I steel my heart for the battle to come.
When Sophocles begins to howl, I know Kavax has left the Nucleus. Part of my heart marches off with him. I stuff the jellybeans into the pocket of my armor that holds the splinter of the gallows.
24
LYSANDER
Drop Shock
I SOAR OUT OF THE ignorance of the spitTube into a silent madhouse where there is no up. The first glimpse of battle is as incomprehensible to my brain as calculus is to a dog. Confined between two horizons of metal—the ship and the surface of Phobos—I’m blinded a half second out of the tube. Only the heavy filters on my helmet’s optics save my ocular nerves from frying.
I fight the instinct to alter course. It won’t matter if I do, not in a drop like this. You can’t dodge anything. If you try, you’ll just slag up the fellow next to you and create a chain reaction that will mire the drop and get ten thousand killed.
Dive. Make landfall. Survive. Find my drill.
Survive. What a laugh. As if I had a say.
The blurred topography beneath winks at me. Guns. They’re almost pretty. Rail slugs whip past at speeds too fast to see. They must slash furrows through ranks of men behind me, to my right, to my left. I can’t tell. I can’t care. I can’t look back. All I can do is go down, down fast as I can to where death waits with its mouth open and its teeth gnashing the men ahead.
My brain is recovering from the sensorial overload of drop shock.
I register landmarks. The city to my left. Bastion One north. The crater south.
I’m on target. I’m not lost. I still don’t have a name. I’m an insect in the path of speeding machines and munitions that won’t even notice my death because they’re not aiming at me. I’m too small.
The assault is too big to grasp much less evoke an emotional reaction. I feel nothing. Not even fear. Just shock and awe and insignificance. I witness the assault in staggered, isolated frames.
Gun batteries belch fire and die by fire.
A whole block of cityscape disappears under the wreckage of a pinwheeling destroyer.
A squadron of bombers slips under flak. I think they’re ours.
A hundred Praetorians vanish in a flash of light.
A clawDrill’s arrest program fails and it disintegrates against a starscraper.
A giant ice monument to Ragnar Volarus melts as a particle beam blazes through its torso.
Three ripWings with Lune crescents on their wings rocket past to shoot down a lone enemy fighter. The crescent seems like the mark of some insane king. Not me. Someone else. Some authority who has strategy, reasons, a plan.
I have no plan. Survive the passage. That’s my only job. Dive. Make landfall. Find my drill. Then the rest. I’m locked onto my drill’s beacon. So are Ajax and Rhone. They materialize out of the chaos onto my flanks. Cityscape veined with colorful advertisements swells ahead. Rapidly, the buildings and battlements grow taller, grander even as the scenes of battle shrink.
A ripWing crashes into a soft-drink advertisement, beheading the smiling vixen.
Armored men dive onto gun batteries and lay charges.
A Praetorian lands too fast behind his clawDrill and is sucked into its business end.
Missiles slither from civilian starscrapers.
Bodies fly like confetti from a bisected transport.
My theater shrinks and becomes more comprehensible the closer I draw to our drill. It has landed on a metal and duroglass mesa about half a click shy of our designated landfall. Fuck it. Its Helldiver has already started to dig. I don’t blame him. The dull gray surface rushes up to greet me. Am I dead? Am I Hades staring at a necropolis where humans are fused in the landscape itself? The mesa has faces in it. Faces. Hundreds of terrified faces.