“The bloodyhell is this?” Narol asks, eying the cockroaches and the remains of the snake and the
bottles. The Howlers look at the ludicrousness of one another awkwardly.
“We’re performing a secret occult ritual,” Sevro says. “And you are interrupting, subordinate.”
“Right,” Narol says, nodding, a little disturbed. “Sorry, sir.”
“One of our Pinks stole a datapad from a Bonerider in Agea,” Dancer says to Sevro, not amused by
the display. “We found out who he is.”
“No shit?” Sevro says. “Was I right?”
“Who?” I ask, drunkenly. “Who are you talking about?”
“The Jackal’s silent partner,” Dancer says. “It’s Quicksilver. You were right, Sevro. Our agents say he’s at his corporate headquarters on Phobos, but he won’t be for long. He’s bound for Luna in two days. We won’t be able to touch him there.”
“So Operation Black Market is a go,” Sevro says.
“It’s a go,” Dancer admits reluctantly.
Sevro pumps his fist in the air. “Hell, yeah. You heard the man, Howlers. Get scrubbed. Get sober.
Get fed. We’ve got a Silver to kidnap and an economy to crash.” He looks at me with a wild grin on his face. “It’s gonna be a hell of a day. A hell of a day.”
P hobos means fear. In myth, he was the offspring of Aphrodite and Ares, the child of love and war.
It’s a fitting name for the larger of Mars’s moons.
Formed long before the age of man, when a meteorite struck father Mars and flung debris into orbit, the oblong moon floated like a cast-off corpse, dead and abandoned for a billion years. Now it is the Hive teeming with the parasitic life that pumps blood into the veins of the Gold empire. Swarms of tiny, fat-bodied cargo ships rise from Mars’s surface to funnel into the two huge gray docks that encircle the moon. There, they transfer the bounty of Mars to the kilometer-long cosmosHaulers that will bear the treasure along the great Julii-Agos trade routes to the Rim or, more likely, to the Core, where hungry Luna waits to be fed.
The barren rock of Phobos has been carved hollow by man and wreathed with metal. With a radius
of only twelve kilometers at its widest, the moon is ringed by two huge dockyards, which run perpendicular to each other. They’re dark metal with white glyphs and blinking red lights for docking ships. They slither with the movement of magnetic trams and cargo vessels. Beneath the dockyards,
and at times rising around them in the form of spiked towers, is the Hive—a jigsaw city formed not by neoclassical Gold ideals, but by raw economics without the confines of gravity. Six centuries’
worth of buildings perforate Phobos. It is the largest pincushion man has ever built. And the disparity of wealth between the inhabitants of the Needles, the tips of the buildings, and the Hollow inside the moon’s rock, borders on hilarious.
“Looks larger when you’re not on the bridge of a torchShip,” Victra drawls from behind me.
“Being disenfranchised is so damn tedious.”
I feel her pain. The last time I saw Phobos was before the Lion’s Rain. Then I had an armada at my back, Mustang and the Jackal at my side, and thousands of Peerless Scarred at my command. Enough
firepower to make a planet tremble. Now I’m skulking in the shadows in a rickety cargo hauler so old it doesn’t even have an artificial gravity generator, accompanied only by Victra, a crew of three Sons gas haulers, and a small team of Howlers in the cargo bay. And this time I’m taking orders, not giving them. My tongue plays over the suicide tooth they put in my back right molar after the Howler initiation. All the Howlers have them now. Better than being taken alive, Sevro said. I have to agree with him. Still. Feels strange.
In the aftermath of my escape, the Jackal initiated an immediate moratorium on all flights leaving Mars for orbit. He suspected the Sons would make a desperate bid to get me off planet. Fortunately, Sevro isn’t a fool. If he had been, I’d likely be in the Jackal’s hands. Ultimately, not even the ArchGovernor of Mars could ground all commerce for long, and so his moratorium was short-lived.
But the shock waves it sent through the market were staggering. Billions of credits lost every minute
the helium-3 did not flow. Sevro found it rather inspiring.
“How much of it does Quicksilver own?” I ask.
Victra pulls herself beside me in the null gravity. Her jagged hair floats around her head like a white crown. It’s been bleached and her eyes have been blackened with contacts. Easier for Obsidians to move about the rougher ends of the Moon than it would be without the disguise, and being one of the largest Howlers, she hardly could pass for any other Color.
“Hard to guess,” she says. “Silver ownership is a tricky thing, in the end. The man has so many dummy corporations and off-grid bank accounts I doubt even the Sovereign knows how large his portfolio is.”
“Or who is in it. If the rumors of him owning Golds are true…”