Page 11 of Under the Iron Sky

She was out of bombs, and there was only enough power in her gun for one shot—but Soraya was a very good shot. There were barely twenty feet between her and the three of them. One shot of Light between the queen’s eyes would kill her. That was the whole reason they were here, after all—but she’d need to sacrifice Noah.

Soraya liked to think she was logical. Level-headed to a fault. For years now, she’d put the needs of the Vordellians above and beyond herself. Beyond anything. Nothing else mattered. But did that extend to Noah’s life?

This Dar’rak was clearly injured, but Noah’s chin was right there in the palm of his hand, and there was no doubt in Soraya’s mind that the moment she pulled the trigger to kill the queen, the Dar’rak would snap Noah’s neck.

But if she shot the Dar’rak, the queen would kill Soraya before she had a chance to grab another weapon, and Noah was in no position to fight. Then some other Dar’rak would take the creature to be healed, she’d make another nest, and all of this would’ve been pointless.

Soraya saw it again. The aftermath of the last time a nest had been allowed to flourish. The blood. The survivors screaming over the bodies. The Vordellians would not recover from another siege like that—but Noah was so young.

He was softer than most too. Kinder. The war hadn’t beaten those smooth edges into something sharp and dangerous yet. He still peered around corners and wondered what he might find there; whether it might be a person in need or a magical cure that was going to right all the world’s wrongs, and not an enemy that needed to be put down before they could end you.

It was an impossible question: Could she sacrifice one life to save a thousand?

The answer came to Soraya much too quickly, cutting deeper than any stalker’s claws ever could, but before she could take aim, Noah moved. And Soraya saw it too late. The circular piece of metal that’d been strapped to his chest earlier and was now flashing in his bloody-stained palm

“Tell my mum I love her,” Noah said, just before he smiled one last time and detonated the bomb in his hand.

4

There was a metal bird perched on the edge of Soraya’s desk—which wasn’t exactly an issue. The problem was it wouldn’t shut up.

“M-m-message from C-Command. Will you r-receive?”

Soraya ignored the familiar, just as she had for the last eight minutes, and wiped away the ash obstructing her protective goggles. Rolling her shoulders, she held the two pieces of broken sunrifle next to each other with one hand, then raised the blowtorch in the other and resumed welding them back together. Her mission jacket lay draped across the back of her chair, leaving her in a tight sleeveless black vest that had an open mesh back for extra ventilation—a staple of Vordellian fashion once upon a time.

Even without the thick outer layer, the room was stiflingly hot. A bead of sweat slid down the back of her neck as she ran the blue flame across the torn metal.

Soraya’s workshop was a cupboard of a room, but she’d done the best with what she’d been given. An entire library of tools hung from various brackets around the room, and there was not a wall spared from either shelves filled with boxes of spare parts or blueprints of every type of weapon or familiar that might need her attention—her maps and lifelines once upon a time, now there purely for decoration.

Soraya could feel the bird still watching her from the edge of the workbench, the camera that was its eye humming softly, zooming in on her every move. She wondered what it thought. If it still had enough power to even compute what she was doing, or if it just blindly followed every order given to it.

She thought this one might’ve been a parakeet once upon a time, although he wasn’t faring much better than his extinct counterpart. The machine was missing a leg and most of his beak, and his once-golden feathers were now mostly bronze and speckled with rot, a bluish-green rust. Once a telltale sign of neglect, they were common now, those colors.

Mined from golden mountains so high in the Fresurn plains they were practically touching the suns, goldinium had been the spine of the Vordellian empire. The perfect metal for Light manipulation due to its intense conductivity, everything from machines to weapons and simple household appliances had been made from the stuff. It was made from pure sunlight, or so the legends said, and without it—rot. The same rot that covered almost every bit of machinery nowadays. Even the armored plates on Soraya’s mission uniform had succumbed to it. All that was once gold and gleaming, now blue and green.

When Aleena died, the suns really had set with her.

The bird hopped a little closer. He looked like he might topple over on the faintest breeze, but good Gods, if Soraya had to hear it stutter one more time, she was going to break something.

Probably the bird. Probably the faulty voice box that was grating on her already thin patience like nails on a chalkboard.

It was her own fault really. Her bracers, both of them scratched and discarded at the far side of the desk, had been beeping for the better part of an hour with an incoming message, a message that she took great pride in ignoring in favor of fixing the many, many, many broken weapons that’d been left at her workshop door while she’d been destroying the nest.

Clearly, Command wasn’t taking the hint that she did not want to be disturbed right now, hence the bird tip, tip, tapping his way over. “M-m-message from C-Command. Will you r-r-receive?”

Soraya ground her teeth and kept her eyes on the blue sparks lighting up the room.

Don’t shoot him.

Do. Not. Shoot. Him.

The bird hopped closer, his rusted joints creaking loudly against one another. Good grief, when was the last time someone oiled that thing?

Soraya flipped the gun over to work on the other side. She’d already welded all the internal compartments back together so it should function just fine, but she wouldn’t know until she’d finished repairing the outer shell.

“M-m-message from C-command. Will you r-receive?”

“No.” Soraya swiped a hand to bat it away. The familiar scuttled back a few steps, then came hopping right back to rest against her elbow. It was a spirited little bastard, she’d give it that. “And unless you’d like to be broken down into a nice pocket watch, go away.”