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“Yes, that,” I say.
“Well…” Clown says, about to light into me. Pebble thumps his shoulder.
“Of course we’d stay, Reaper!” she says sweetly. “This our family…”
“But we have demands….” Clown continues, wagging a finger. “If you desire our full services. But…for now, we must be off. I fear I have shrapnel in my ass. So I beg your leave. Come, Pebble. To the surgeons.”
“Bye, boss!” Pebble says. “Glad you’re not dead!”
“Squad dinner at eight!” Sevro calls after them. “Don’t be late. Shrapnel in your ass is not an excuse, Clown.”
“Yes, sir!”
Sevro turns to me with a grin. “Sods didn’t even bat an eye when I told them you were a ruster. Came with me and Rags to fetch your family right off. Was wicked telling them what was what, though. This way.”
As we pass the ship Pebble and Clown exited, I see up the ramp into its belly. Two young boys work inside, blasting the floors with hoses. The water runs brownish red down the ramp onto the hangar deck, flowing not into a drain, but down a narrow trough toward the edge of the hangar, where it disappears over the edge.
“Some dads leave ships or villas for their sons. Asshat Ares left me this wretched hive of angst and peasantry.”
“Bloodydamn,” I whisper as I realize what exactly I’m looking at.
Beyond the hangar is an inverted forest of stalactites. It glitters in the artificial subterranean dawn. Not only from the water that dribbles along their slick gray surfaces, but from the lights of docks, barracks, and sensor arrays that give teeth to Ares’s great bastion. Supply ships flit between the multiple docks.
“We’re in a stalactite.” I laugh in wonder. But then I look down at the horror beneath and the weight on my shoulders doubles. A hundred meters below our stalactite sprawls a refugee camp. Once it was an underground city carved into the stone of Mars. The streets are so deep between the buildings, they’re more like miniature canyons. And the city spills over the floor of the colossal cave to the far walls kilometers away, where more honeycombed homes have been built. Streets switchback up the sandstone. But over that a new roofless city has spawned. One of refugees. Muddled skin and fabrics and hair all writhing like some weird, fleshy sea. They sleep on rooftops. In the streets. On the switchback stairs. I see makeshift metal symbols for Gamma, Omicron, Upsilon. All the twelve clans that they divide my people into.
I’m stunned by the sight. “How many are there?”
“Shit if I know. At least twenty mines. Lykos was small compared to some of the ones near the larger H-3 deposits.”
“Four hundred sixty-five thousand. According to the logs,” Ragnar says.
“Only half a million?” I whisper.
“Seems like a hell of a lot more, right?”
I nod. “Why are they here?”
“Had to give them shelter. Poor bastards all come from mines the Jackal has purged. Pumping achlys-9 into the vents if he even suspects a Sons presence. It’s an invisible genocide.”
A chill passes through me. “The Liquidation Protocol. Board of Quality Control’s last measure for compromised mines. How do you keep this all a secret? Jammers?”
“Yeah. And we’re more than two clicks underground. Pop altered the topographical maps in the Society’s database. To the Golds, this is bedrock that was depleted of helium-3 more than three hundred years ago. Clever enough, for now.”
“And how do you feed everyone?”
“We don’t. I mean, we try, but there haven’t been rats in Tinos for a month. People are sleeping toe to nose. We’ve started moving refugees into the stalactites. But disease is already ripping through the people. Don’t have enough meds. And I can’t risk my Sons getting sick. Without them. We don’t have teeth. We’re just a sick cow waiting to be slaughtered.”
“And they rioted,” Ragnar says.
“Rioted?”
“Yeah, almost forgot about that. Had to cut rations by half. They were already so small. Those ungrateful shitheads down there didn’t like that much.”
“Many lost their lives before I descended.”
“The Shield of Tinos,” Sevro says. “He’s more popular than I am, that’s for damn sure. They don’t blame him for shit rations. But I’m more popular than Dancer, because I have a badass helmet and he’s in charge of the nitty-gritty shit I can’t do. People are so stupid. Man breaks his back for them and they think he’s a dull-wit pennypincher. Least the Sons love him—and your uncle.”
“It’s like we’ve fallen back a thousand years,” I say hopelessly.
