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One of Octavia’s own?
“Bring him to me.”
I peer out over the submerged isthmus to the greater host of Atalantia’s legions. Those Gold knights are still on the ridge. I amplify magnification on two figures standing in the foreground. Atalantia’s face peers back at me. She wears her own optics. She makes a masturbating motion, then flings the load off into the wind, shaking her head at me. I retreat behind the bluff for fear of snipers. If anyone can shoot straight in this, it’s her Gray dragoons.
My Arcosian Knights throw a man down at my feet. He’s in Fulminata armor, all right. Here’s hoping…
I pull him up by the hair to find the handsome, lean face of a Gold male in his thirties. Eyes that could have belonged to the purest of Gold stock—and once did, before Screwface got ahold of him and gave them to Mickey—stare back at me.
I pull the man into a hug, careful not to crush him with my starShell. The Arcosian Knights look more than a little confused, but only Sevro, my wife, Theodora, and Mickey knew the details of how we carved the man a new visage and sent him amongst our enemy as a mole nearly three years ago. Though I will need to know why he didn’t warn us of Atalantia’s ambush on Orion’s fleet, I am happy to see him. I feel safer all of a sudden.
“Screwface, you old psycho,” I say, leaning into him. Alexandar stiffens at the presence of an original Howler. Rhonna grins. She loves Screwface almost as much as she loves Freihild, Sefi’s personal assassin.
“The name is Horatius au Savag, you fool. As for ‘old.’?” Screw gives a little sniffle. “I’m nigh on thirty-five. Savvy, my goodman?” He cocks out a nasty smile. “Figured you’d be near Tyche.”
If he burned cover, something bad is on its way. “What’s happened?”
“Bad news, boss. Heliopolis is under assault.”
I feel a cold inevitability creeping upon me. “What?”
“Twenty legions of the second wave made landfall. Twenty crashed or had to abort. The storm has delayed those on the ground, but he’ll likely send a strike force for the storm engine.”
More than a million men and tanks. “Whose legions?”
“Leopards are at the vanguard.”
“Ajax.”
“I know.”
After Apollonius was captured on Luna, there was a vacuum in Gold ground command. I wondered who would rise to fill the Minotaur’s place as their preeminent Legate. Falthe seemed poised, but Ajax has been making his bid. As violent as his mother, but twice as ambitious, he will assault the city till it falls, heedless of casualties. The man’s a raging beast with the unfortunate danger of also having a brain.
“Darrow…” Screwface says, stepping close. “What’s wrong?”
“Orion is dead.”
He looks stunned. For men like him, like me, who have fought this war since the beginning, there are so few who inspire us. Orion was that. We are lesser in her absence.
I can’t afford to mourn.
With Tyche drowned and Heliopolis fallen, my army will have nowhere to retreat. We will be surrounded, bombarded, and destroyed.
The moment Harnassus predicted has finally come. I must choose between saving my army and destroying theirs. I stare across the drowning city at the Ash Legions safe inland on the Talarian Peninsula. Atalantia is there. Trapped by the storm. I can find a way to cross, I’m sure.
If Thraxa survives, if the Morning Star made it to her, if the First Legion still exists, they will give me the power to destroy Atalantia and her entire Ash Legion, the hard Lunese core of her army.
It would be the greatest victory of the war.
But it will cost me Heliopolis, and in the end, my army.
The Republic could recover. Gold will not.
Us for them would be the rational transaction.
Orion deemed it worth the price.
Hearing the words of the Ash Lord on my friend’s own lips haunts me. A rational transaction. I look at the drowning population of Tyche, who welcomed us even when Heliopolis spat on us and yet still fell on the wrong side of one human being’s moral arithmetic. And I see a spiraling spiritual darkness. Ensnaring not just me, not just the friends whose cruelty I have emboldened, but Eo’s darkening dream. Did this all begin with betraying the Sons of Ares in the Rim? With the destruction of the Ganymede Dockyards? With my Rain over Mercury? So many concessions in the name of necessity. So many horrors in the name of liberty. Where is the beauty I saw when Ragnar reached for Sefi’s hand instead of his blade as he died? Where has our humanity gone? Is this why Sevro left? He felt the creep of doom and sought to cling to light?
