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This is not how Rhone thought it would be, but he holds his salute for an extra second before hopping down to his men. “I will not die here,” Cicero says. “Your boots have juice, you fool. Enough to get you to Heliopolis!”
“Go if you must, Cicero. I abandoned the Praetorians before. I will not do so again.”
He comes within an inch of my face. “They say a strain of madness runs through the gens Lune. Oh, how right they are. Farewell, ye infected victims of the martial disease.” Cicero takes to the air without a word of apology to his men who cannot follow. Two dozen fly with him. More than twelve hundred watch their leader go and look down at their depleted armor.
I remain with Kalindora atop the Storm God as the enemy machines groan and rattle within the dust. I close my eyes, seeking my mother’s face. Even now in the darkness, I cannot find her.
I feel so alone. Then I hear Kalindora draw her razor. “Lysander.”
When I open my eyes, a single figure emerges from the dust less than a kilometer away. A desiccated rag flaps from his shoulder. He spots us on the Storm God and thrusts his hand up into the profane crux.
Only a few of his words reach us. “…heart beats like a drum…”
The scout disappears and a moment later the sound that has plagued my dreams from the Palatine to the Belt finds me in the desert waste. The sound could only come from a legion escorting the Reaper.
The howling of wolves.
Ahhhroooooooooooooooooo
Kalindora goes still.
He should be in the north, pinned in by Atalantia’s legions. Not a thousand kilometers south. Not here. How could they still have power? How could they cross so much distance when we barely made it a hundred kilometers into the hypercane’s headwinds before draining our suits?
Kalindora’s awed voice answers the unspoken question.
“He rode the storm.”
* * *
—
The wait for Darrow is not long, but it is horrid. My eyes sting from the heat. It radiates up from the metal hull we perch upon. My nose fills with the fumes of machines, the dry lifelessness of the desert, and smoke.
The enemy emerges from the dust like a line of mechanized Mongols. A depleted legion of filthy metal Drachenjägers carried by the winds of the storm trudges over the crest. They are not so numerous as they sounded. I glance over at Rhone. A grin spreads on his face. With the high ground and an entrenched position, we might yet survive this.
Kalindora thinks otherwise.
My tongue tastes the chalky roof of my mouth and feels the contours of my teeth. I tense my hand around my razor. It feels small in the pulseArmor gauntlet. I raise my helm.
Ahhhroooooooooooooooooo
“Stay with the heir,” Kalindora says to Rhone. Thirty-three Praetorians with life yet in their starShell cores cluster tight around me atop the downed Storm God’s highest perch. Nearly two thousand Scorpions and Praetorians shelter in firing lines along the rim of the broken engine below.
It begins in silence, and then comes the terrific clamor of four wedges of Drachenjägers thundering across the desert. Their armored legs, each twice as tall as a starShell, eat up the distance. Guided antipersonnel missiles slither toward us. Interceptors race to challenge them. Depleted uranium rounds hammer through the wreckage around our position like it’s cheesecloth. Praetorians fire back from prone positions all along the rim of the Storm God. There are no better sharpshooters in all the legions. A drachen teeters sideways and explodes. Another runs off at an oblique angle as its pilot is shot through the cockpit.
With a heavy anti-tank rifle, Rhone fires down at the plain.
I scan the charging Drachenjägers. Darrow won’t be in one of those rigs. He likes mobility. Where is he? I turn around to search our flanks for Darrow. As a boy, I watched him become a leader. I’ve studied him more than any other man. I know his trade, but t
hat knowledge seems so useless here in the chaos of battle. There are only four directions, but Darrow has used so many tactics over the years, I freeze. It feels like he could come from anywhere.
I spot shadows moving in the dust cloud kicked up by the Drachenjägers’ charge. “He’s using them to obscure his movements,” I say to Kalindora. “Like at the Battle of Gibraltar. With a frontal sally we can hit him when he swings to a flank.”
“I concur. Prepare to charge,” Kalindora tells the Praetorians. StarShell pulseFists whine as my men shunt their remaining core power to their weapons and their boots. The heat of the desert invades my suit.
On Kalindora’s signal, we break from our position, bursting upward into the sky and ricocheting forward, headlong toward the shadows over the charging Drachenjägers. Then something ripples above in the sky.
A Praetorian’s body comes apart beside me, bisected cleanly at the waist. I lift my razor just in time. Something clangs against it, knocking me downward. The air contorts above as men in ghostCloaks shear down through the center of my charging Praetorians. I shoot point-blank at a blur and see the light bend as the railgun round goes through a man’s chest. He spins downward, his wolfcloak rippling.
