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Holiday whistles. “Gotta love deep pockets. The fuel would cost my annual wages. Twice over.”
We cross the hangar to meet Quicksilver’s pilot. The trim young Blue waits at the bottom of the ramp. She has no eyebrows and her head is bald. Winding blue lines pulse beneath the skin where subdermal synaptic links connect her remotely to the ship. She snaps to attention, eyes wide. Clearly she had no idea who she was transporting until now. “Sir, I am Lieutenant Vesta. I’ll be your pilot today. And I must say, it’s an honor to have you on board.”
There’s three levels to the yacht, the upper and bottom for Gold use. The middle for cooks, servants, and crew. There’s four staterooms, a sauna, and crème leather seats with dainty little chocolates and napkins sitting primly on armrests in the passenger cabin to the far back of the cockpit. I pocket one. And then a couple more.
As Holiday and Vesta prep the ship, I strip off my pulseArmor in the passenger cabin and unpack winter gear from one of the boxes. I dress in skintight nanofiber weave that’s much like scarabSkin. But instead of black, it’s mottled white and looks oily except for textured grips on the elbows, gloves, buttocks, and knees. It’s crafted for polar temperatures and water immersion. It’s also a hundred pounds lighter than our pulseArmor, is immune to digital component failures, and has the added benefit of not needing batteries. Much as I enjoy using four hundred million credits’ worth of technology to make me a flying human tank, sometimes warm pants are more valuable. And we’ll always have the pulseArmor if we need it in a pinch.
I’m struck by the silence in the cargo bay and the hangar as I finish lacing my boots. There’s still fifteen minutes left on my datapad’s timer, so I sit on the edge of the ramp, legs dangling off, to wait for Ragnar. I pull the chocolates from my pocket and slowly peel the foil off. Taking half a bite, I let the chocolate sit on my tongue, waiting for it to melt as I always do. And as always, I lose patience and chew it before the bottom half is melted through. Eo would make candy last for days, when we were lucky enough to have it.
I set my datapad on the ground and watch the helmet cameras of my friends as they wage my war for Phobos. Their chatter trembles out of the datapad’s speakers, echoing in the vast metal chamber. Sevro’s in his element, rushing through the central ventilation unit with hundreds of Sons loading themselves into the air ducts. I feel guilty for sitting here watching them, but we each have our parts to play.
The door we entered through opens with a groan and Ragnar and two of the Obsidian Howlers enter the room. Fresh from the battlefield, Ragnar’s white armor is dented and stained. “Did you play gently with the fools, my goodman?” I call down from the ramp in my thickest highLingo. In reply, he tosses up to me a curule: a twisted gold scepter of power given to high-ranking military officers. This one is a tipped with a screaming banshee and a splash of crimson.
“The tower has fallen,” Ragnar says. “Rollo and the Sons finish my work. These are the stains of subGovernor Priscilla au Caan.”
“Well done, my friend,” I say, taking the scepter in my hands. On it is carved the deeds of the Caan family, which owned the two moons of Mars and once followed Bellona to war. Among great warriors and statesmen, there’s a young man I recognize standing by a horse.
“What is wrong?” Ragnar asks.
“Nothing,” I say. “I knew her son is all. Priam. He seemed decent enough.”
“Decent is not enough,” Ragnar says forlornly “Not for their world.”
With a grunt, I bend the curule against my knee and toss it back to him to show my agreement. “Give it to your sister. Time to go.”
Glancing back at the hangar with a frown, he checks his datapad and files past me into the cargo hold. I try to wipe the blood from the curule off on my white suit’s leg. It just smears over the oily fabric, giving me a red stripe on my thigh. I close the ramp behind me. Inside, I help Ragnar out of his pulseArmor and let him slip into the winter gear as I join Holiday and Vesta as they initiate preflight launch.
“Remember, we’re refugees. Aim for the largest convoy heading out of here and stick to them.” Vesta nods. It’s an old hangar. So it has no pulseField. All that separates us from space are five-story-tall steel doors. They rumble as the motors begin to retract them into the ceiling and floor. “Stop!” I say. Vesta sees what caught my attention a second after I do and her hand flashes to the controls, stopping the doors before they part and open the hangar to vacuum.
“I’ll be damned,” Holiday says, peering out the cockpit to a small figure blocking our ship’s path to space. “It’s the lion.”
—
Mustang stands in front of the ship illuminated by our headlights. Her hair washed white by the blinding light. She blinks as Holiday cuts the headlights from the cockpit and I make my way to her through the dim hangar. Her dancing eyes dissect me as I come. They dart from to my Sigil-barren hands to the scar I’ve kept on my face. What doe
s she see?
Does she see my resolve? My fear?
In her I see so much. The girl I fell in love with in the snow is gone, replaced in the last fifteen months by a woman. A thin, intense leader of vast and enduring strength and alarming intellect. Eyes kinetic, ringed by circles of exhaustion and trapped in a face made pale from long days in sunless lands and metal halls. Everything she is dwells behind her eyes. She has her father’s mind. Her mother’s face. And a distant, foreboding sort of intelligence that can give you wings or crush you to the earth.
And just at her hip sits a ghostCloak with a cooling unit.
She has watched us since we arrived.
How did she get inside the hangar?
“?’Lo, Reaper,” she says playfully as I come to a halt.
“?’Lo, Mustang.” I search the rest of the hangar. “How did you find me?”
She frowns in confusion. “I thought you wanted me to come. Ragnar told Kavax where I could find you…” She trails off. “Oh. You didn’t know.”
“No.” I look back up at the ship’s mirror cockpit windows, where Ragnar must be watching me. The man’s overstepped his bounds. Even as I arranged a war, he went behind my back and endangered my mission. Now I know exactly how Sevro felt.
“Where have you been?” she asks me.
“With your brother.”
