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minata shock troops claw through gaps three hundred meters from the ground. Tanks roll into canyons bored through the durosteel by particle cannons. A firefight rages on the ramparts of the wall, where a thin gap exists between the wall and shield. Her great guns are silent. Harnassus may already be dead.
If they take the city, if they take down her shield generators, the Ash armada can reinforce them, and lower torchShips and Annihilo herself across the south. My army will come out of the desert after surviving the storm and be met with oblivion.
Screwface understands. “I’ll scout forward and see where we should hit.” He jumps off the ledge to cross the boulder field below in small bursts.
I turn back to my men.
They can hear the battle if not see it. Less than a third of the force that set out for Tyche joins me on the hill. Many lie dead in the Plains of Caduceus, or were swept away by water or wind on our path to Tyche. Alexandar is gone. Rhonna and Colloway sent into the storm. It has been nearly twenty-four hours since I’ve seen Thraxa. Only Felix is left amongst my Gold Howlers.
I feel the despair.
“Where is the Morning Star?” a Green pilot asks. His hair has already started to fall out. His mech is smoothed by sand like a river stone. Does his gun even work?
“It is on its way,” I say. “We must buy Harnassus time. One last charge of metal. I will—”
The Green’s head disappears. Screaming munitions slam into my men from above with pinpoint accuracy. A depleted uranium round gouges a hole through my armor and punches through the meat of my right hamstring. I go down hard.
Spitting dust from my mouth, I watch as shrouded figures in billowing desert cloaks fall from a cliff hundreds of meters above. Bursts of air come from their skipBoots, cushioning them as they land on my Drachenjägers’ open cockpits to drive razors through the top of my pilots’ skulls, or land behind them to scalp off their faces or claim their heads. I can’t tell if Felix goes down.
In less than ten seconds, I am the only one alive except for a pilot they pull from his cockpit to vivisect on the shoulder of his own mech.
Rough hands cut me from my starShell and drag me out. Men with masks of child’s faces tear off my gravBoots. The pilot screams above me. A boot stands on my throat as the man in the Pale Mask treads the sand to squat in front of me. They pour engine solvent on my face to clean off the blood. A hunched Obsidian with giant sunburnt arms looms with a blowtorch.
“It’s him,” a heavy Obsidian voice confirms.
“Gratitude, Falthgar.” The Fear Knight takes off his gloves and puts them in a pocket of his scorosuit. It is a simple radiation-resistant and water reclamation suit. No armor for this impaler of men. No vestments of rank or gaudy embellishments. His cloak is tattered and eaten by the desert. His forearms cracked and baked brown. His gloveless hands pallid and thin as spider legs. He leaves his mask on. It is the face of a sexless child ringed with hair of serpents. No matter which way he turns his head, the child’s eyes stay focused on me. The Pale Mask.
“You asked me a question long ago,” the mask warbles. “It was on Mars before we lost her. You asked, what do I fear? I fear a man who believes in good. For he can excuse any evil.” He holds up a hand to feel the wind. “What have you done?”
I try to spit on him, but there is no moisture in my mouth.
“Show me your face!”
“Fear has no face.” His head tilts. “You still don’t understand. No matter. Falthgar, Ravan, Kestril, Thorhand, Kaffa. You have the cameras for his wife?” Five of his hunting beasts step forward. “Prime. Castrate him. Fuck him bloody in the ravine.” He pauses. “Before you slit his throat, feed him his cock.”
“Yes, dominus.”
Animalistic fear. I struggle in vain against the huge Obsidians. They lift me as if I were a Red again and drag me toward the ravine behind my slaughtered men. The Fear Knight sits in the sand to watch them rape me as Heliopolis falls.
Not like this. Not like this.
The slaveknights toss me to the ground and shove my face in the sand as the rest watch. A boot pins my head down. I can barely breathe as they discuss how to cut off my armor, and then who will go first. A scorosuit buckle tinkles as it is unclasped behind me. A growing nausea and terror and…lightness. The hand that pushes on my head loses its strength. I twist my head. Grains of sand trickle upward. The Obsidian’s white hair floats in a corona. A shadow creeps across the sand. They try to push me down, only to float upward themselves. A horrible laugh bubbles out of me as a voice filled with static sings over my open com.
“If your heart beats like a drum, and your leg’s a little wet, it’s ’cause Midnight’s come to collect a little debt.”
“You pricklicks,” I hiss through the sand. “You forgot Colloway xe Char.”
With all my might, I shove off the ground. Combined, they weigh more than a ton in their gear, but in the gravity shadow of the moonBreaker, there is no weight. We launch upward. The sudden reversal confuses their equilibrium. They held me down with boots and pressure but had no clean grip. They try to invert themselves to grab at me, but only turn themselves into a spin. I float cleanly away, waiting till a boot spins past my head. I seize it and jerk down, levering the top of my skull into the bottom of a jaw. It shatters. I pin the larger man to myself and headbutt his face until I feel it cave in. Dizzy, I strip his long knife and ride his body to the ground, where I launch up to the next. Blood in my eyes, I can barely see. He tries to orient himself. But I’ve played more in zero-G. I pass him without touching, drawing the long knife along his body and opening his torso from groin to throat. Two of the others fire at me, and suffer the consequences of recoil. They become minor threats. The last, five meters away, pulls his gun, but the movement itself sends his body spinning backward. I throw the knife and suffer the spin.
I crash upside down into a rock wall. My armor crunches and I hold on backward. I try to orientate myself. The Fear Knight saw me kill his men from only fifteen paces away, but only just escaped the clutter of his floating men. He uses his boots to burst toward me, sliding sideways through the air, his long rifle aiming for my head through the floating mechs. He fires. Then gravity returns. A falling mech intercepts his shot. His men slam downward as the Morning Star bursts out of the shroud of dust that hangs over the desert. It boosts upward and roars past toward Heliopolis. I nearly lose purchase on the rock and fall to my death as blinding light explodes from the battered moonBreaker to wipe away an entire cohort of enemy tanks.
A wall of iron churns over the desert to the northeast, appearing out of the shadow of the Morning Star and its own shroud of dust.
The First Army has come to Heliopolis.
It passed through the Waste of Ladon in the night, through a path paved in the storm by the Morning Star. Most of her cannons have been mangled by the storm, but ripWings pour out of the moonBreaker, followed by starShells, transports, and barges of infantry. A great howling fills the air. A magnificent dusty figure in a streaming wolfcloak and bearing a warhammer falls from the sky.
The Fear Knight looks up at Thraxa au Telemanus in full-charged wargear, looks at me, takes aim, and then disappears in a missile strike. Thraxa catches me before my fingers give out on the rock face. She floats me down to the ground, kissing my face with her fox helmet.
