“The Dancer of Faran is gone,” Captain Pelus says. “No escape pods.” It was a skeleton crew, but still forty die. Better than a thousand. Only two torchShips of my initial sixteen remain. They race around Antonia’s Pandora behind us, but that ship is a black, hulking monster. She shreds the fastmovers till they’re dead metal. And when escape pods launch from the quiet ships, she shoots them down. Victra watches the murder quietly. Adding it to Antonia’s debt.
Roque is inviting us to launch our leechCraft, drawing the Colossus closer to my dead ship. A kilometer away now. I accept the invitation. “Launch all leechCraft at the surface of the MoonBreaker,” I say. “Now. Fire the spitTubes.”
Hundreds of empty suits fire out the spitTubes as they would in an Iron Rain. Two hundred leechCraft launch from the four hangars of my ship. Spewed out in a stream of ugly metal, each could carry fifty men to pump into the guts of the MoonBreaker. Controlled remotely by Blue pilots on board Persephone’s Howl, they race fast as they can to cross the dangerous space between the two capital ships. And they’re wiped away before they make it half the distance as Roque detonates a series of low-yield nuclear warheads.
He guessed my move.
And now my flight of ships is nothing but debris floating between the two vessels. Emergency sirens flash on the ceiling of my bridge. Our long-range sensors are down. Our guns smashed. Multiple deck breaches.
“Hold together,” I murmur. “Hold together, Pax.”
“We’re receiving a transmission,” Virga says.
Roque appears in the air before me. “Darrow.” He sees Victra too. “Victra, it is done. Your ship is dead in the water. Tell your fleet to surrender and I will spare your lives.” He thinks he can end this rebellion without putting us in the grave. The entitlement of it rankles me. But we both know he needs my body to show the worlds. If he destroys my ship and kills me, they’ll never find me in the wreckage. I look at Victra. She spits on the ground in challenge. “What is your answer?” Roque demands.
I bend my fingers crudely. “Fuck you.”
Roque looks off screen. “Legate Drusus, launch all leechCraft. Tell the Cloud Knight to bring me the Reaper. Dead or alive. Just make sure he’s recognizable.”
I look to the Blues at their station. Most were here when I took this ship. When I renamed her. They became pirates with Orion, rebels with me. “You all heard him,” I say. “Well done. You did the Pax proud. Now say goodbye, get to your shuttle, and I’ll see you soon. There’s no shame in this.” They salute and Captain Pelus opens the hatches in the bottom of the pit. The Blues begin their slide down the narrow shaft into the berth where there should be escape pods, but we replaced with heavily armored shuttles. My own escape pod is built into the side of the bridge. But Victra and I aren’t escaping. Not today.
“Time to go, baby boy,” Victra says. “Now.”
I pat the doorframe of the bridge. “Thank you, Pax.” I say to the ship. One more friend lost to the cause. I follow Victra and the marines in a sprint down the empty halls. Red lights pulse. Sirens wail. Small thumps reverberate through the hull as we go. Roque’s leechCraft will be swarming the Pax by now. Melting holes through her sides and pumping in boarding parties of Grays and Obsidians led by Gold knights. Instead of me, they’ll find an abandoned ship. A molten circle throbs on the hallway wall beside a gravLift as we board. I watch the orange deepen till it is the color of the sun. The drums still beat through the speakers. Thump. Thump. Thump.
Victra leaves a mine behind as a present for the boarding party.
We hear it detonate ten levels above us as the gravLift deposits us on level negative three in the auxiliary hangar. Here my true assault force waits. Thirty heavy assault shuttles with their ramps down. Blues performing flight checks in the cockpits. Orange mechanics working furiously to prime engines, fill fuel tanks. Each ship is filled with a hundred Valkyrie in full smart armor. Reds and Grays accompany them in equal number for special weapons tasks. The Obsidians stomp their pulseAxes and razors as I run past, a thunderous chanting of my name. I find Holiday in the center of the hangar standing with Sefi and a coterie of Valkyrie who will be my personal squad. With them, praying in a small group, are the Helldivers I requested from Dancer. They’re less than half the size of the Obsidians.
“Ship is breached,” I say to Holiday. She jerks her head at a squad of Reds, who rush off to cover our back. “Distance is less than a click.”
“No…” Holiday says with an elated laugh. “That close?”
“I know,” I reply excitedly. “They want to get close so we can’t shoot down their leechCraft.”
“So now we give them a kiss,” Victra says with a little purr for Holiday. “And some tongue.”
Holiday bobs her cinderblock head up and down. “Then let’s stop jawin’.”
Sefi pulls a handful of dried mushrooms from a satchel. “God’s bread?” she asks. “You will see dragons.”
“War’s scary enough, darling,” Victra says. Then as an aside: “I one time tripped on that shit with Cassius for a week on the Thermic.” She catches my look. “Well, it was before I met you. And have you ever seen him with his shirt off? Don’t tell Sevro, by the way.”
Holiday and I abstain from the mushrooms as well. Automatic weapons fire rattles from a hall just beyond the hangar. “The hour is here!” I boom to the three thousand Obsidian in the assault shuttles. “Sharpen your axes! Remember your training! Hyrg la, Ragnar!”
“Hyrg la, Ragnar!” they roar.
It means “Ragnar lives.” The Queen of the Valkyrie salutes her razor to me and begins the Obsidian war chant. It spread through the black armored assault craft. A horrible dread sound, this time it is on my side. I’ve brought the Valkyrie to the heavens, and now I let them loose.
“Victra, you prime?” I ask, worried about Antonia being so near. Is my friend distracted by her sister?
“I’m gorydamn splendid, baby boy,” the tall woman says. “Take care of that pretty little ass of yours.” She slaps my butt before backpedalling, blowing me an obnoxious kiss and jogging to her shuttle. “I’ll be right behind.” I’m left with the Helldivers. They’re smoking burners, watching me with evil red eyes.
“First one through gets the bloodydamn laurel,” I say. “Helmets on.”
Little needs to be said to such men. They nod their heads and grin. We depart. I fly thirty meters upward on my gravBoots to land atop of one of the four clawDrills we confiscated from the platinum mining company in the inner asteroid belt. They stand in a row on the hangar deck, each fifty meters apart. Like grasping hands, the cockpit where elbow would be, the dozen drill bits on the deck where fingers would reach. Each is retrofitted by Rollo to have thrusters on the back and thick plates of armor extend down the sides. I slide into the cockpit, enlarged for my frame and armor, and slip my hands into the digital control prism.
“Fire them up,” I say. A familiar thrum of energy goes through the drill, vibrating the glass around me. I grin like a madman. Perhaps I am one. But I knew I could not win this battle without altering the paradigm. And I knew Roque would never be driven into a trap or lured into an asteroid belt, for fear of exposing his larger force to ambushes. So I had only one recourse: hide my ambush in a flaw of character. He always preached for me to step back, to find peace. Of course he thought he knew how to beat me. But I’m not fighting as the man he knew today, as a Gold.
I’m a bloodydamn Helldiver with an army of giant, mildly psychotic women behind me and a fleet of state-of-the-art warships crewed by pissed-off pirates, engineers, techs, and former slaves. And he thinks he knows how to fight me? I laugh as the clawDrill shakes my seat. Filling me with a dormant, crazed sort of power. An enemy boarding party breaches the hangar from the same gravLift we took. They stare up at the huge claw drills and evaporate as Victra’s shuttle fires a railgun at them from point-blank range.
“Remember the words of our Golden leader,” I say to the Helldivers. “Sacrifice. Obedience. Prosperity. These are the better parts of humanity.”
“Bloodydamn slag,” one says over the com. “I’ll show her the better part of my humanity.”