We turn into a hall, running from Apollonius’s closing horn, and a Lion simply disappears in front of me. Like he didn’t even have armor. I don’t even know what killed him. The last thing I see is one of his legs tumbling down the hall.
Panting a few minutes later, I kneel in the darkness of a rec room for Red Legion I, where jellyfish writhe in an aquarium. The jellyfish are red, grisly like that poor dead Lion’s leg. His name was Arminius. He liked garments. He wanted to design them. He was going to use his pension to start a clothing line. I was going to give him seed money. He didn’t know.
“Movement in hall,” Glaucus says and recalls his drone. “It’s Holiday.”
Holiday and six Lions slip silently into the rec room. “Did it work?” I ask.
Smoke slithers from Holiday’s armor. “They bought it. Votum thinks we’re two levels up, heading east toward the secure trams. Drones say shaft D is clear.”
“And Apollonius?”
“His men are mostly tied up with Red Legion in the battle for Sector Two. We got a coms officer to talk.” I don’t ask how. “Officer said Kavax is alive. Apollonius broke his back then sent him to the rear as a prize.”
He’s alive. Thank Jove. I breathe out in relief. A prisoner, but alive.
I try to set my worries away as we wait for the second team I dispatched to return to the rec room. When they do return, they carry two domed backpacks. “Cloaks and razors?” I ask.
They nod. “Twenty and fifteen. Some night optics too.”
“What do we need those for?” Holiday asks.
“Insurance,” I reply.
The intercom crackles. “Augustus, this is Cicero au Votum. You are cut off from your army. You are surrounded. There is no escape from the Bastion. Neither is there shame in surrender. Indeed, there is more dignity in that than in being hunted down and killed like an animal. Apollonius is stalking you this very moment. Lune is not Atalantia. He has agreed to recognize the Republic as a valid entity. Should you surrender to me, you will be afforded all the rights due your station as a head of state. Your men will likewise—”
I click my tongue twice and my Lions move out.
Cicero is getting worried. So am I. We haven’t seen Apollonius himself in an hour. Never a good sign.
The halls are quiet, dark. Our wounded don’t slow us yet. We have five so far. Two from Apollonius himself, and he didn’t even manage to close. The wounded are fueled by the cold fire of the Republic’s best emergency combat cocktail: Mjolnir-6. I’ll stay sober. Mjolnir-6 blunts empathy. If I lost that, I’d send what was left of my bodyguards to create a distraction so I could slip out by myself. For the Republic.
That’s what Adrius would do. Or my father. Not me.
Not today.
We move slow and careful, and manage to reach one of the many entrances to the tank garages in which shaft D is located on level thirteen without encountering the enemy. We’re so close. Holiday turns on her ghostCloak and slips forward into the darkness with three Lions. I hear the slur of a railgun. A gurgling. Holiday comes back with a red knife. Drones were right. Clear except for a few Votum techies trying to hack the gravLift’s controls to better move troops.
I give the nod.
We move into the hangar as quietly as possible in heavy armor. Three Lions have popped the lift door open a few meters. It’s a big door—thirty meters wide for tanks. We form up around the Lions. Holiday drops a drone into the darkness. I watch its feed on my HUD. The shaft looks clear, even on thermal. The shaft terminus is deep within the moon but still within Sector One’s pie-like shape. It won’t get us back to our lines in the Hollows but it’ll get us close.
Holiday spots something I don’t and motions a team to deploy nanowire across the mouth of the lift entrance. They string a dozen strands of the near-invisible polyene fiber. Casually, as if checking the door for traps. Her drone is still snooping down the shaft as she replays what caught her eye: cold spots arrayed around the circumference of the tunnel shaft two hundred meters below. A few degrees lower than the surrounding metal. Scores of them. GhostCloak dampeners. Good ones. The tunnel is lined with soldiers. It’s a trap.
Apollonius for sure. He didn’t know what level we’d access on, but somehow he knew this shaft was our way out. I thought I’d randomized our movements enough.
“I’m picking up a signal. Stasis field. Probably in the shaft. We’d be frozen right above them if we dropped. Flies in amber.”
I eye the darkness of the garage behind us through the lenses in the back of my helmet. He’s watching us right now. Maybe sending men to flank us. Maybe coming himself.
“Why haven’t they made a move?” I ask.
“They don’t know which of us you are. Better if we’re flies in amber.”
Meaning they don’t know which one of us not to kill, and they respect the quality of my Lions enough to know they’ll have to kill most of us. So, Apollonius is trying to take me alive after all. Did Lune make him a team player?
“Let’s punch them in the mouth and scram.” Holiday nods to the walkways above. “Go through engineering. Cook this shaft. We have other options.”
“There’s another option. Do we have a net?”
“We have two.”
“Lions, Kavax is captured. He has sensitive information in his head, and he is our friend. Many of you know him. Many of you have attended his namedays. The only way we will get him back is if we have a prisoner of equal worth to trade. But we have a chance to take one here.” They answer with a chorus of affirmative radio clicks. “He mustn’t suspect a trap. Holiday, you’re up.”
“I’ll use the drone,” Holiday says. “Soon as they move, false retreat, first pride into quicksand formation. Second pride fire support. Third pride secure hangar doors. Let’s not get flanked. Exit is engineering. Sovereign, you’re rear.”
“No. I’m first pride. You lot might need the muscle.”
Holiday pauses but doesn’t argue. “Do not draw your razor.”
I nod, ready for violence. Holiday guides the drone back up the shaft and lets it get extra snoopy. It coasts toward one of the cold spots. Closer. Closer. A laugh echoes in the shaft. The cloak melts away. A bull’s head emerges from the shadows in front of our distant drone.
“Found you,” says Apollonius.
A fly-sized drone blinks above. Apollonius must have one on every level leading to the shaft.
We drop charges and let Apollonius see us flee. Through my rear lens, I watch the charges go off. The gap in the door becomes a column of fire. Golds cocooned in pulseShields rise through the flames and slip into the hangar after us. Right into the nanowire. The nanowire activates and oscillates back and forth like a saw, at a rate of a million oscillations a minute. It goes through armor like butter. I’ve never seen men cut into such weirdly precise blocks of meat and metal as the first three who meet the wire. The next two hack their way through it and chase us. Then Apollonius rushes in backed by Grays.
“Now,” Holiday orders, and my Lions turn on the enemy and fire as one on Holiday’s targeting tag. The first Gold disintegrates as twenty-five expert marksmen and I converge our fire. The Lion next to me bucks back, arms broken like twigs as he’s shot by a pulseFist. Holiday targets the next Gold. So do twenty-four rifles. He is deleted five paces from us. Metal pings off our shields. One of his legs hits my shoulder.