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“Oh, come on. Who do you trust, if you don’t trust old Screw?” He has been with me since the beginning. Never asking for anything. Never earning fame like Sevro, or family like Pebble and Clown. He is maybe the most like me. A creature of war. It looks lighter on him. He extends a hand down to help me up. With a weary nod, I take it.
My friend leads me by the pale light of a lamp through the pale stone halls of the Mound. Maritime wind lolls through the open windows, carrying the tang of brine and the murmurs of seagulls. It creeps past the guards of the night watch, stirring their cloaks, to kiss the bald, weary soldiers who cough flecks of blood under the gaze of Votum portraits in the grand ballrooms, libraries, and pillaged galleries of a more decadent age.
We go out the back of the palace. Descending down the switchbacking sea cliff stairs that connect with the ancient seawall. The sky pales to a dull chrome in anticipation of sunrise, but the bay beneath remembers the darkness of night. Its high tide crashes against a coral scarp at the base of the seawall. And with a backrush, the tide reveals a second world of wildlife. Coral crabs and sealarks skitter and dodge the gulls and fire eagles that swoop through the spray to feed.
We pass Red Rat legionnaires sharing coffee at the base of particle cannons. While the rest of the army withers from radiation poisoning, only my Reds soldier on. In the absence of Pegasus Legion, Rat Legion has become the spine of the army. They nod to us and return to their coffee. Soon we pass lines of coughing Mercurians fishing off the side of the seawall, then descend the wall’s interior stairs and exit through a gate that leads out beyond the wall to a barrier beach running parallel to the shore.
A congregation of two parts gathers in the gloom. Men and women wet from the sea make the first. They are jubilant. An aching song drifts from them, a Red one I remember hearing as a child. But it is not just Reds who sing it; other Colors are scattered through their ranks. The second and more numerous group by far is a long line of hunched, bitter creatures who wait in silence. One by one they slump out to a man who stands waist-deep in the surf. He whispers something to them. They clutch their fists out before them and shout as they are dunked into the sea. Many are blind. All are already so sick with radiation, they don’t fear the seawater.
It seems I have entered a dream, and it cracks as I am seen. The song fades. And they turn warily to watch me. Even the blind know I am here. I feel ashamed to have intruded on this private moment. They are Martians all. The dirt so many of them brought in canisters from home is clutched in their hands. They followed me here, but I do not feel like one of them any longer. These arms and legs that have stripped lives from so many seem all the heavier and more alien here. This height given to me by a mad carver seems like a monstrous feature I wish I could hide and be rid of so that I could stand amongst them, part of them, a man of mines, following someone else.
I salute them and retreat across the sand.
Screwface catches up to me. “What was that?” I snap at him.
“I thought—”
“That I wanted to have a holy communion? You think those men need to see their Imperator begging for forgiveness?”
“Nah, but I thought maybe you needed it.”
“What I need is to be left alone.”
He doesn’t leave me alone, and I don’t want to go back to the Mound and face the decision of the high command or be burdened with more endless complaints and problems. I don’t want to sit in my room and think about my son and wife. So I strike south along the beach, leaving the penitent behind, wishing I could join them, but knowing a leader cannot.
It would be immoral to rob them of that last bit of confidence they have left in me.
In time, I begin to forget where I am as I walk. Screwface follows behind at a distance. The ocean sighs against the shore. Sand crabs skitter along the waterline, navigating mounds of kelp populated with sea fleas. I walk until we reach a climate seam. Soon, low-altitude Agathis trees sway along the shoreline. Migratory Nymph trees wade in the water on legs of white and pink roots. Jungle archipelagos dapple the horizon, the nearest home to a Free Legion defense gun. Local birds perch atop its metal barrel.
The topography reminds me of South Pacifica, where outside his ancestral estate Daxo taught my son to build a sandcastle. He spent more time with Pax that day than I did, taking him into the woods with the huntmasters, walking through his statue garden to listen to birds and see if he could name them, and back to the beach to see their mighty sandcastle washed away by the night tide. All while I sat inside preparing the invasion of Grimmus-held Africa.
How sad I didn’t cherish a moment there with my son.
All moments are like that sandcastle, it seems.
There is no permanent happy future. There is no Vale.
It all washes away.
The shield flickers overhead. I glance back at Screwface with a frown. Barefoot, he jogs up holding his boots. “Friendlies?”
I see them now through the clouds. Streaks of falling fire. The shield ripples back on, killing birds in its energy arc, but now the falling projectiles are inside it. My first thought is that we’ve been betrayed. But the projectiles slow over the sea. The air around them distorts from gravitational fields. Water floats upward along with fish and a long ebony squid before crashing back down.
Nearly forty six-story obelisks stand end-on-end offshore. The water boils around them as they cool.
“What are they?” Screwface asks.
“That looks like Sun Industries stealth hull,” I say.
He gives me a bored look and raises an eyebrow. “What say we do a little reconnaissance, boss?”
“We should wait for reinforcements.”
“Some badass you are.” He strips off his shirt and pants and runs to the water. “Where’s your sense of adventure!” He dives into a wave.
“Ah, shit.” I strip off my shirt and follow him in. The sea is warm as bathwater. Flash-cooked fish float around the obelisks, killed when the obelisks transferred their heat into the sea. I dive down and find the bottom of an obelisk thoroughly embedded in the seafloor. By the time I surface, Screwface is already climbing up the slippery hull along a line of rivets. I follow. There seems to be a hatch at the top.
“Ah, the cavalry,” Screwface mocks a minute later as a line of shuttles swoop our way from Heliopolis. There’s men onshore waving to us from beside their gravBikes. They seem to be celebrating. My fingers ache from supporting my body weight with their tips. Screw shows off by hanging on to the rivets with two fingers and leaning off to wave to the men. He glares at the shuttles.
