The image cuts out mid-auction, replaced by grand military architecture. Stars and distant warships glitter out the mouth of a hangar flanked by caryatids of the Carthii family. A hauler mech, escorted by a pack of Syndicate thorns and an arbiter of the Ophion Guild, stomps out the back of a steaming blockade runner. The mech sets a cargo box down on its end. Four legionnaires in gray armor and white capes stamped with a purple bull open its giant lock. The cargo container parts down the center. Pressure hisses out.
Inside, Sevro hangs imprisoned in a slave rack. Months of beard growth covers his jutting chin. His hair is long and shot with white. Waste tubes with pressure motors worm out his emaciated gut downward into plastic sacks. He was shipped muzzled and conscious with barely enough calories to keep him ticking. His eyes are open and bloodshot and staring at someone beyond the hologram with familiar, tired hate.
A manly voice purrs. “They whisper you are dead. That is how you left me: for dead. But I have claimed a new domain.” The hangar disappears, replaced by an angelic, evil visage. “Are you dead, Darrow?” Apollonius au Valii-Rath waits for an answer, as if this weren’t a recording he made for me to see. “If you are dead, then this dark age has ended with a whimper.” He looks despondent and casts his fierce eyes to the sky. “No. You are not dead,” he says to himself, then levels his gaze and lets his smile creep. “You cannot be dead. I know it in my war-bred bones. But you are not on Mars, nor Earth, nor with your adamantine woman defending your sphere, nor raging against the forces of Helios and Atalantia at the head of your inimitable Ecliptic Guard. So, you must be hiding, wounded and weak. Scuttling in the shadows, a mouse in the dark. Young Ajax, son of Aja, aggrieved and dauntless, seeks your blood. So too the Rim, and their myriad hunters, chief of all: Diomedes, the Storm. They will catch you if you make for Mars, little mouse. They lie in wait. Clever, patient, hungry. They will never let you lead another army. Better to come here. Better to pass the time with me.”
He peers at me like a dragon might when hearing of a distant treasure—acquisitive, scheming, entranced. He runs his tongue along his teeth.
“To tempt you, I have acquired your mongrel at no small sum. On Luna he was ill-treated. Ninety days of reprieve and dignity will I grant him in my domain, but on the ninety-first day, he will be released into the Hanging Coliseum of the Dockyards of Venus, as were the Carthii captives of old. And like the Carthii of old, I, along with my guests, will hunt him upon equine wings, and mount his head on a spear and feed his organs to the war pyre.” He closes his eyes as if imagining the wind through his hair as he rides a Carthii pegasus, and the scent of burning flesh as he laughs with his friends by the sacrificial fire. When his eyes open, they shine with madness. “Unless you come to me. Unless you come and we decide at last who is hunter and who is prey. Until then, my noble foe, per aspera ad astra.”
The light of the hologram fades, then the hologram starts over again, an endless loop. Screw pauses the image. Harnassus, Thraxa, and Colloway slump in the gloom around my small breakfast table. Screwface itches his stump. Cassius leans against the door with his arms crossed watching me. At his feet sits Aurae, her eyes closed.
“Where did you get this filth?” Screw demands from Cassius and thrusts a finger at Aurae. “Did your Siren conjure it?” Even Harnassus thinks that’s ridiculous. Aurae doesn’t bother opening her eyes to address the accusation. “Why is she even in this room?”
“I can leave,” she replies.
“Slag that,” Cassius says. “After what we went through to steal the helium, you should all kiss our feet.” He pauses. “Never mind, you’d probably all enjoy that, you creeps. But to answer the query: I didn’t get Apollonius’s message. The mad bastard has been transmitting that from the Dockyards of Venus for two months. Due to all the jamming, I only picked it up three days before my contacts at Starhold linked me up with Colloway.”
“So you just happened to come across it,” Screw sneers.
Cassius remains droll. “After being cut to ribbons by Raa Dustwalkers, breaking my word to Diomedes au Raa, racing across half the system to plunge through the Ash Armada into a warzone to save Darrow, then back through the Ash Armada again—under the guns of the Annihilo, the Annihilo—I ally with the Minotaur, a grandiose ruffian overcompensating for his poor heritage whom I haven’t seen since he was quoting Milton high on lexamine and blowfish poison in a Martian brothel fourteen years ago?” He bats the air like a cat. “Please. If you’re desperate to insult me, at least do me the dignity of being lucid.”
“Dignity.” Screwface pitches his head back and laughs. “That the virtue you imparted on your impaling protégé, the Heir of Silenius? Dignity? Ha!”
At the mention of Lysander, Cassius’s smile disappears. “Atlas impaled your troops, not Lysander. It’s not his style.”
“Oh, we know his style,” Thraxa says. “Rhonna. Darrow’s niece. It wasn’t Atlas who beat her face in. Your boy did that, after he shot Alexandar in the head. Not in combat. While they were having drinks.”
Cassius frowns. “Alexandar au…”
“Arcos,” Colloway says coolly. It’s the first time since he arrived that I’ve seen him look at me with any degree of sympathy. “He was Darrow’s archLancer, Bellona. He was an arrogant shit, but the best soldier I’ve ever served with. Full stop. He offered Lysander blades. Lysander declined. Took his head off at range. His own cousin’s.”
Cassius’s face falls. ArchLancers to an Imperator are often as close as children. The guilt on his face is exactly why I didn’t tell him. It’s not his fault, and I didn’t want his sympathy.
I miss Alexandar. We all do. Which is why we all feel so sick looking at Sevro’s auction.
Harnassus steps up to me, gentle. “Darrow, I know no one wants to be the one to say it, so I will. There’s nothing to do here. We’re millions of clicks behind enemy lines. Thanks to Bellona we have helium, and the reactor repairs on the Archimedes are being finalized. We should burn for Mars while we still can.”
I stare at Sevro’s image. The Dockyards of Venus are not so far away.
He’s close. Closer than I thought.
Love for Sevro or hate for the horned one? Which is it that draws me like gravity?
“Why did we survive Mercury?” I ask. No one answers. I look around the room. “Why did we survive this prison here?”
“Darrow, we haven’t survived yet. Not until we get home,” Harnassus says. “Every day you’ve held us together, telling us home would soon be in reach. Now it is. Now is your chance to get back to our forces. To Virginia…to your son.”
I resist that current and feel the pull of this new one.
“We survived so we could make a difference in this war,” I answer for them. “The fight on Mars begins over Venus. The ships of the Ash Armada come from one place and one place only—the Dockyards of Venus. Atalantia betrayed Apollonius to us. The man is pathological with his grudges. So, the only reason she’d let him keep those dockyards is because she believes he has the ability and the willingness to destroy them. I left Apollonius with only a handful of men. Which means there are only a few ways he could present that dire a threat. Bombs, no? That gives us an opportunity.”