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I rip off the door of an infantry transport. A hundred Grays in wargear stare at me in green light. Alexandar opens fire with his railgun. Thunder booms overhead. Felix has fallen to a group of Grays with uranium rifles. We send them scattering and haul him to his feet. Another second and he’d be dead. The Golds are rallying to their legion standard.
The standard rises from the spine of a giant blue titan. The titan is sixty meters tall, four legs, and three main cannons, with disk-shaped alien cockpit. The standard is five meters tall and made of three emblems—the god Helios, a Society pyramid, and a giant pair of golden hammers. A Votum is with us. Please let it be Scorpio himself. Two Drachenjägers plunge toward the standard. As the titan arrests their charge with its gravity gun, Golds in starShell swarm over the Drachenjägers like a pack of velociraptors taking down a tyrannosaurus.
They jump onto the rightmost’s back and hew through the spine armor to cut the power lines connecting the stomach generator to the cockpit. The titan’s third arm pulls the top half off the cockpit. A Gold in a starShell reaches in and pulls the Orange pilot in half with his armored hands and throws her body into the wind.
Gods, can they kill.
And I thank the Vale that it is the Arcosian Knights with me. Not a Red I know could survive this outside a Drachenjäger. I search for Rhonna, but can’t find her rig in the fray.
I gather Alexandar and a hundred of his kin and we drive toward the rallying Golds from the flank. Rhonna appears to the left and her wedge draws their attention. By the time they see us coming to th
eir right, we’re amongst them, firing point-blank and drenching our blades.
With Alexandar, I mount the sixty-meter crest of the titan, and kill the two Golds defending the height. Alexandar carves the pilot out and holds him in the air. The Gold man wears an incredible suit of armor that appears nearly translucent. He slashes at Alexandar with his razor. Alexandar bats the lightning-fast blade away and pins it in his starShell’s hand. With his other hand, he squeezes the pulseHelm of the Gold until it shears off. That’s quality, there. “The Primus himself!” Alexandar shouts above the wind. “Hiding in a titan. What a Pixie.”
The veins in the forehead of the old tyrant pulse as he glares up, at the mercy of a man a quarter his age. “Blood traitor!” he snarls. Then he sees my curved blade.
“Scorpio au Votum,” I warble out my speakers. Through the rain and spattered blood on my canopy, his vain eyes meet mine, and I drink in his fear. Blood leaks down his face. “For a hundred and one years of rape, genocide, and enslavement of your fellow man, I sentence you to the mud.” There atop his titan, I cut him in half at the waist and Alexandar hurls him off the height.
“The blood of the Conquerors thins,” Alexandar drawls through the coms. He cuts the standard off the titan and hands it to me. “One more for your collection, goodman.”
I shove it back into his hands. “Build your own.”
With a grin, he holds it up against the crackling sky and leaps off to land on Rhonna, who trudges to pick us up. He stabs it down into the thick shoulders of her Drachenjäger, sharing the bounty.
“To Tyche!” I bellow. My men pick up the call and we push through the shattered remains of the division to leave it thrashing in the mud. More landfalls lie ahead. More enemy to kill. More. More. More.
A laughing zeal fills me.
By the time we leave the flower fields two hours later, only five hundred drachens have fallen, and the standards of fourteen legions decorate the shoulders of my rolling columns. Alexandar has taken four with his own hand. I trail with three. His second cousin Elander has two, along with the captain of the Drachenjägers, and Rhonna herself. We scalp the cores and battery shards from the dead for our own starShells, rearm when the winds abate, and push for the coastal highlands where Tyche and Atalantia await.
I’m coming, Atalantia. I’m coming for your head.
ONE THOUSAND PRAETORIANS, the Love Knight, and the daughter of Romulus follow me west to seek the eye of the desert storm.
It makes us a thousand and three worlds of misery. Seraphina and Kalindora flank me. Each man, each woman, alone in the darkness of their suits, imprisoned by the wind and sand.
Left foot. Right foot. Left foot.
Courtesy of Seraphina’s storm experience, we employ a Rim trick. Towing wire holds us together like grapes so we do not lose one another in the storm. Periodically, Seraphina and Praetorians with storm experience detach to scout our perimeter.
Still, our progress is slower than desired. Storm winds hit us head-on and increase to over eight hundred kilometers per hour, with visibility of scarcely two meters. The storm robs us of the sky and our instruments. Bit by bit, trespassing against the wind drains our starShells.
After eight hours of this, only the transition of the storm’s dimness to absolute darkness denotes the arrival of night. When the wind lulls, we jog, tripling our pace by using the thrusters in small bursts. Several lines snap because of this, and we lose Praetorians in the storm.
There is no going back for them or for us.
The fear that gripped me in the tube of the Annihilo is gone. The sensation of standing on the edge of the cliff was worse than the fall.
Life has winnowed down to a simple task and survival. That simplicity is a comfort. For years I was in a torpor and cowardly in indecision. Here I have certainty. I will prove myself to Ajax. To Atalantia. I am their family, not their rival.
Forward. Left foot. Right foot. Left foot. Right foot.
“Something is out there,” Seraphina says. I peer into the darkness and see nothing. Still, Kalindora gives the order to hunker down. We prime our weapons. “Holy hells. Contact.”
There’s a chorus of hold-fire calls from the scouts.
Dread shapes move in the murk. Only when they come within five meters and they engage their lights can we see they are starShells. Ten of them. Our headlamps illuminate Votum hammer sigils painted on the chassis. Might be hundreds behind them for all we can see. One steps out before the others.
