No. It’s an apartment complex. Those are windows. Tenants.
I invert, land, and become a man again. I am alive. I almost roar.
My heart hammers in my chest. Under my boots a Green woman holding a glass of whiskey stares at me through the cracked duroglass of her living room window. The plants in her apartment start to shake, but not from me. Her eyes meet the dark glass eyeholes of my helmet. In the reflection of the glass between us I see my second wave descending behind me.
I feel powerful. She is insignificant. I am too hateful from the drop and the death I saw to care if my thoughts might be wicked. The Green flashes me the crux and tilts back her whiskey.
It’s already boiling. She screams. Her plants behind her wither. Her hair singes. Moisture abandons her body and her flesh catches fire as the heat generated by our clawDrill rages through her apartment. Frozen by the whiplash from insect to human again, I watch the woman with detached remove, thinking: Who’s the bug now?
The spell is broken when Ajax barks my name.
My Praetorians have secured our landfall. Dogfights swirl overhead. Rhone stomps up to me with bad news.
“They prioritized the clawDrills. Took out half of them. The rest have landed and have penetration.” Only half. Gods, their ripWings are good. I hop onto a coms antenna protruding from the surface of the apartment complex. I have a few seconds to see the landfalls from a clear vantage. Even then, it’s impossible to tell if my plan is doomed.
The light of war stutters across the landscape. It stirs a memory, summoning an apocalyptic image I saw in an old paper book when I was young and making my way through the Palatine stacks—a lithograph depicting the war of god’s angels after paradise was lost. The clawDrills tower on the grim hellscape like the pagan obelisks to which the angels flocked.
It is hell—terrible and awesome and silent beneath the heavens. I can appreciate its strange beauty now that I am human again. Maybe that is the problem. Maybe that is why we wage war, because bugs don’t and angels do.
I shiver and so do the drills as they disappear into the moon. Geysers erupt after them. Level by level the moon depressurizes and spills its guts out. They were things once, the guts. Metal bulkheads, glass windows, plastics, insulation, and bodies, all now churned into fractal spew. Then identifiable debris comes as pressure shoves anything untethered on the compromised levels toward the holes ripped in their world. Toward these debris geysers rush my Praetorians.
I glance up past the waves of assault ships coming down at the mauled belly of the Lightbringer. My flagship and captain have done their job and dropped their cargo. Time for Pytha to let the others through. If they are coming, that is.
If they aren’t, we’re dead, and in the moment that is all right.
Then Ajax pulls me down from the antenna. “You want to make a sniper’s day?” he snaps and curses me with a litany of phrases I’ve never heard before.
Rhone radios the breach is ready. With Ajax I rush to its edge. It is twenty meters wide. Helmet says three hundred meters deep already. The geyser of debris unceasing as level after level depressurizes. The clawDrill is already out of sight. Its demonic light throbs far below, promising death or glory. The hair on my arms stands on end as an energy field activates. Glancing up, I see Phobos’s main shield has come back on, cutting us off from support. My stomach sinks.
A Praetorian shouts a warning and points toward the pyramid looming over our landfall—Bastion One—where scales of light appear on the dark surface of the fortress. From the scales, tiny humanoid shapes emerge. They are tiny only because we are so far away.
“Drachenjäger,” Ajax murmurs over the com.
More scales glow on the fortress as a dozen more garages open.
My voice is eerily calm. “They’ll sweep down the pyramid and hurl us off this moon. If they take our landfall, we’re done before the main wave can land. We’ll be cut off inside.”
“Not our job,” Rhone says. “This isn’t the Ladon. Trust your guard. Our objective is down there.”
“Waiting on you, dominus,” Demetrius says and jerks his head toward the breach.
Ajax gives me a nod. “Let’s go make peace.”
Already I hear the cool litany of centurions over the com as they assess the new threat and prepare to rebuff the Drachenjägers. I gaze one more time at the far-off machines. They’ve begun a disjointed lope down the pyramid’s slope, building speed as they come in rolling waves of steel.
I contemplate when, years from now, I will sit in the Palatine garden and review all the fair things my peace has wrought, and I dive into the mouth of hell.
25
VIRGINIA
War Prism
ONE OF THE MANY lessons I learned at the Institute is the higher your rank, the less war is about courage or discipline or mud or blood, and the more it becomes a game of accounting. Usually it’s about food, fuel, and weapons. To defend Phobos, I invest bodies and resources like a Silver portfolio manager. Minimum cost, maximum profit. That is the game.
Victra, Niobe, and Char must handle the fleet. Phobos is my charge. If it is lost, so are our docks, our ability to replace our lost ships, and our ability to defend orbit. Mars will then be strangled. Not today, not tomorrow, but slowly and then surely, when they are finally able to use the moon to launch a Rain at the planet itself. We thought that the Rain would be today. We were wrong. So many of us were wrong. Nothing to do now but fight.
The crown on my head is a prism that breaks down the chaos of war into comprehensible information. It cocoons me in battle. The crown can monitor and manage up to a hundred and eighty engagements at once. Knowing my limitations undershoot the machine’s, I hand off forty of these engagements to Nakamura and the Nucleus’s staff.
Center in my field of view is the ever-shifting 3D tactical map. It shows the wormlike progress of the clawDrills through the top tiers of Phobos. My legions rush to head them off.
Our Bastion-based defense system was built so that the Bastions could be reservoirs of reinforcements able to direct troops to any breach in their sector. But with the clawDrills bypassing the Bastions and our ten-deck security layer—some of the drills have penetrated as deep as fifty decks already—our system is being pushed to its limits. No—it has been circumvented completely.
In just the first fifteen minutes of the assault, I’ve nearly emptied Bastion One’s reserves. Of Bastion One’s three legions—a hundred and fifty thousand Reds, Grays, Browns, and a few loyal Obsidians—all but several thousand have already been divided and committed.
The first legion makes contact with the enemy thirty-six levels down. The four centuries I tasked with heading off the drill at the tramway are impeccably on time. They fire shoulder-mounted rockets and destroy the drill as it passes through the level.
The drill burrows halfway into the floor before collapsing sideways. An armored capsule affixed above the Helldiver cabin bursts open and berserkers pour out. That’s new. A Gold is with them. The Red Legion centuries open fire. Then Praetorians pour through the smoldering breach and all I can do is send reinforcements.
Sixteen more units make contact with Lune’s forces in the next minute. The close-quarters fighting is bitter. Though outnumbered, Lune’s Praetorian vanguard is armored heavily enough to reduce almost every fight to melee chaos. Yet our numbers are making up the difference. If at the same time Kavax can keep the enemy on the surface from entering their breaches on the decks, we will destroy Lysander and his Praetorians once and for all.