“Makes me miss the boys,” Victra says. Takes me a moment to realize she’s not talking about the Silvers. The last time she and I tried this tactic, Tactus and Roque were with us. We infiltrated Karnus’s flagship from vacuum as he refueled at an asteroid base during the Academy’s mock war. We cut through his hull with aims of kidnapping him to eliminate his team. But it was a trap and I narrowly escaped with the help of my friends, a broken arm my only reward for the gambit.
It takes us five minutes to climb from our landing place to the peak of the tower, where it becomes a large crescent. We don’t go hand over hand, so climbing isn’t the true term. The magnets in our gloves have fluctuating positive and negative currents that allow us to roll up the side of the tower like we have wheels in our palms. The toughest part of the ascent, or descent, or whatever you’d call it in the null grav, is the crescent slope at the extreme height or end of the tower. We have to cling to a narrow metal support beam that extends out among a ceiling of glass, much like the stem of a leaf. Beneath our bellies and through the glass lies Quicksilver’s famous museum. And above us, just over the peak of Quicksilver’s tower, hangs Mars.
My planet seems larger than space. Larger than anything ever could be. A world of billions of souls, of designer oceans, mountains, and more irrigable acres of dry land than Earth ever had. It’s night on this side of the world. And you could never know that millions of kilometers of tunnels wind through the bones of the planet, that even as its surface glows with the lights of the Thousand Cities of Mars, there is a pulse unseen, a tide that is rising. But now it looks peaceful. War a distant, impossible thing. I wonder what a poet would say in this moment. What Roque would whisper into the air. Something about the calm before the storm. Or a heartbeat among the deep. But then there’s a flash. It startles me. A spasm of light that flares white, then erodes into devilish neon as a mushroom grows in the planet’s blackness.
“Do you see that?” I ask over the coms, blinking away the cigar burn the distant detonation made in my vision. Our coms crackle with curses as the others turn to see.
“Shit,” Sevro murmurs. “New Thebes?”
“No,” Pebble answers. “Farther north. That’s the Aventine Peninsula. So it’s probably Cyprion. Last intel said the Red Legion was moving toward the city.”
Then comes another flash. And the seven of us hunker motionless on the crest of the building, watching as a second nuclear bomb detonates a thumb’s distance away from the first.
“Bloodydamn. Is it us or them?” I ask. “Sevro!”
“I don’t know,” Sevro says impatiently.
“You don’t know?” Victra asks.
How could he not know? I want to shout. But I grasp the answer, because Dancer’s words now haunt me. “Sevro’s not running this war,” he told me, weeks ago after another failed Howler mission. “He’s just a man pouring gas on the fire.” Maybe I didn’t understand how far gone this war is, how far reaching the chaos has become.
Could I have been wrong to trust him so blindly? I watch his expressionless mask. The skin of his armor drinks in the colors of the city around, reflecting nothing. An abyss for light. He turns slowly from the explosion and begins to climb again. Already moving on.
“HoloNews has it,” Pebble says. “Fast. They say Red Legion used nukes against Gold forces near Cyprion. Least that’s the story.”
“Bloodydamn liars,” Clown snaps. “Another bait and switch.”
“Where would Red Legion get nukes?” Victra asks. Harmony would use them if she had any. But I wager it was Gold using the bombs on Red Legion instead.
“Doesn’t mean shit to us now. Lock it up,” Sevro says. “Still got to do what we came to do. Get your asses in gear.” Numbly, we obey. When we reach our entry zone on the crescent of the double helix tower, rehearsed routine takes over. I pull a small acid flask from the pack on Victra’s back. Sevro releases a nanocam no larger than my fingernail into the air, where it hovers above the glass, scanning for life inside the museum. There is none—not a surprise at 03:00. He pulls out a pulseGenerator and waits for Pebble to finish her work on her datapad.
“What’s what, Pebble?” he asks impatiently.
“Codes worked. I’m in the system,” she says. “Just have to find the right zone. There it is. Laser grid is…down. Thermal cams are…frozen. Heartbeat sensors are…off. Congratulations, everyone. We’re officially ghosts! So long as no one manually pulls an alarm.”
Sevro activates the pulseGenerator and a faint iridescent bubble blooms around us, creating a seal, so that the vacuum of space doesn’t invade the building with us. Would be a quick way to be discovered. I put a small suction cup on the center of the glass then open the acid container and apply the foam to the window in a two-meter-by-two-meter box around the suction cup. The acid bubbles as it eats through the glass, creating an opening. With a small rush of air from the building into our pulseField, the glass pane pops up where Victra grabs it to keep it from flying into space.
“Rags first,” Sevro says. It’s a hundred meters to the museum floor below.
Ragnar clamps a rappelling winch to the edge of the glass and clips his harness to the magnetic wire. Pulling his razor out, he reactivates his ghostCloak and pushes through the hole. It’s disturbing to the senses seeing his near-invisible form accelerate down to the floor, gripped by the skyhook’s artificial gravity while I’m still floating. He looks a demon made of the heat that shimmers above the desert on a summer day.
“Clear.”
Sevro follows. “Break an arm,” Victra says, pushing me into the hole after him. I float forward, then feel myself gripped by gravity as I cross the boundary into the room. I slide down the wire, picking up speed. My stomach lurches at the sudden influx of weight, food sloshing around. I land hard on the ground, almost twisting my ankle as I pull up my silenced scorcher and search for contacts. The rest of the Howlers land behind me. We crouch back to back in the grand hall. The floor is gray marble. The length of the hall is impossible to gauge, because it curves according to the crescent, bowing upward and out of sight, playing with gravity and giving me a sense of vertigo. Metal relics tower around us. Old rockets from man’s Pioneer Age. The coat of arms of the Luna Company marks the hull of a gray probe near Ragnar. It looks decidedly like Octavia au Lune’s house crest.
“So this is what it’s like to feel fat,” Sevro says with a grunt as he takes a small jump in the heavy gravity. “Disgusting.”
“Quicksilver’s from Earth,” Victra says. “Jacks it up even higher when he’s negotiating with anyone from low-grav birthplaces.”
It’s three times what I’m used to on Mars, eight times what they prefer on Io or Europa, but in rebuilding my body, Mickey jacked the simulators up to twice Earth’s gravity. It’s an unpleasant sensation weighing nearly eight hundred pounds, but it works the muscles something horrible.
We strip our oxygen tanks and stow them in the engine rim of an old space shuttle painted with the flag of pre-empire America. So we’re left with our small packs, scarabSkin, demonHelms, and weapons. Sevro pulls up Victra’s crude maps of the tower’s interior and asks Pebble if she’s found Quicksilver yet.
“I can’t. It’s odd. The cameras are off in the top two levels. Same with biometric readers. Can’t pinpoint him like we planned.”
“Off?” I ask.
“Maybe he’s having an orgy or wankin’ off and doesn’t want his Security to see.” Sevro grunts with a shrug. “Either way, he’s hiding something, so that’s where we’re headed.”
I cue Sevro’s personal line so the others can’t hear us. “We can’t wander around looking for him. If we’re caught in the halls without leverage—”