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“Yeah,” Cyra mutters.
Dano looks over at me, his face hidden behind the tight black plastic of his thermal. “Told you we shoulda hired Geratrix.”
“Geratrix is Syndicate now,” I mutter.
Dano bows his head in mock sorrow. “Another one for the bloody black.”
“It’s not my fault,” Cyra says in a low voice. “They updated their system. New protocols are government. Would take me near thirty minutes to punch in. Shit, it’d take a team of Republ
ic astral hackers at least twelve—”
I hold up a hand. “Hear that?” I whisper. They listen. “That’s the sound of your take getting cut in half.”
“Half?”
“Half a job, half pay.”
Cyra’s got a temper on her as short as a tick’s tooth. Her hand drops to the multigun on her hip. Still, Volga takes one step toward her and Cyra looks like a kitten hearing thunder. I bend on a knee in front of the Green. “It’s not my fault…” she says. I take her chin through the mask and guide it so she’s looking at me.
“Calm down, and tell me the problem.” I snap my fingers. “Today, pissant.”
“I can’t access the Conquerors Exhibit systems,” she admits.
“At all?”
“It’s on an isolated server. Real relics in there, real security.”
I feel a spasm of annoyance in my left eyelid. Damn. Dano’s gonna have to do some acrobatics. “You know how I hate surprises, Cyra….”
“Told you we shoulda bought the gravBelts,” Dano says.
“Say ‘I told you we shoulda’ one more time. See what happens.” He meets my eyes, then glances down at the floor. Thought so. “Spider gloves are good enough,” I say. “Recyclers on.” Dano, Volga, and I pull our recyclers from our bags and strap them over our thermals’ mouth holes. “I trust you still have the doors figured….”
She nods.
“Thirty seconds in each room,” I remind them as Volga slings her gun on her back and approaches the door. Dano rolls up from his stretch and Volga pushes a large flat magnet against the door. It makes a dull thump as it locks onto the metal. We stare at the magnet as its sound reverberates. Through the door our voices won’t be heard, but that might have been. I look to Cyra. She shakes her head. Decibel levels were too low. Clear, Volga wraps her massive mitts around the handle.
My body welcomes the adrenaline, sucking it down like water on cracked asphalt. I look at the watch and feel nothing. My focus narrows to the here and now. I grin.
“No one better sprain their fucking ankle,” I say, warming up my legs. “Go on, V. Shine time.” Volga heaves on the door, rolling it back into the wall.
“And grid one is down,” Cyra says quietly into our coms. Dano goes first into the hall on sound-dampening shoes. I go next and look to see if Volga’s following. She’s right behind me, freakishly silent despite her size. Cyra stays behind, monitoring the security systems and the guard level.
Down a narrow staff corridor lies another heavy security door. “Hold,” Cyra says. “Grid two is down. Twenty-nine, twenty-eight…” Volga puts a mechanical lever under the door and activates it. The heavy door slides upward, jolting along with the lever. We shimmy under the door. A painting of a furious warhorse strapped to a chariot is suspended mid-stride from the ceiling. In the chariot is an archer firing at men in bronze armor and horsehair helms. I stand quickly to look around the vast room. Weeping stone children peer down from the floral columns. Great frescoes explode with color along marble walls. Soon the floor pressure sensors, cameras, and lasers will come back on.
“Twenty.”
A sense of nostalgia sweeps over me as we run across the floor. Seems just yesterday I was here as a legion pledge. I remember boarding the tram to come to the city center wearing the winged pyramid pin they give us, puffing my chest out when highColors would nod to me or lowColors would step out of my path. Stupid kid. He thought that pin made him a man. It just made him a pet. And nowadays it’ll get you scalped.
“Eight. Seven…”
After three more halls and a stitch in my side later as I try to keep up with my younger crew, we reach the Conquerors Exhibit, where we prop open the door with the lever and shimmy under. Carefully, we stand on a narrow slip of metal, just shy of the marble floor that has the inbuilt pressure sensors.
The room is as domineering as its subjects. Built by enraptured Golds to honor their psychotic ancestors who conquered Earth, it is grand and brutal, and unchanged by the Republic except for a few modifications. They’ve included a list of the conquered amongst the conquerors. Representations of pre-Color humans stand beside casualty statistics. One hundred and ten million died for Gold to rule. Then their bombers dropped solocene into the troposphere and neutered an entire race. Didn’t even have to convert them to the Color hierarchy. Just had to wait a century for them to die out. Bloodless genocide. Give one thing to the Conquerors. They were efficient.
Pricks.
At the center of the exhibit, under a stone archway with the legend CONQUERORS EXHIBIT, twenty ancient Ionic columns line an ascending stairway. At the top, a Delphic temple sits, and inside that, past priceless relics encased in duroglass, lies the object of my collector’s desire. It is a sword of the first overlord, a razor belonging to the great bastard, hero of the Conquerors, Silenius au Lune. The Lightbringer.
