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“Lyria,” Liam says, touching my leg. He follows it up till his hands find my face. He’s alive. Covered with mud, but alive. “Lyria, are you hurt?” he says through tears.
“I’m here,” I say. I sit up and clutch him with my right hand. “I’m here.” I hold him and sob among the corpses. “I’m here.”
Something is wrong with my left shoulder. It hurts more than anything has ever hurt. Blood leaks from it and a splintering pain threads its way down my throbbing arm. We’re in a soup of broken, squirming bodies. The Red Hand are dead or fled to cover to fire up at the sky. The two bone-white Republic ships fire at the Hand trucks and landed transports. Steel men whip through the air.
It’s too much. Too loud. I take Liam away from it, following the few survivors of the massacre to hide amongst the reeds in the riverbed.
There, hunkered in fear, we listen to the battle. A dozen others survived. They flinch when a bomb goes off. But I sit in silence, rocking back and forth, watching bugs go out over the water. My sister is safe. Her children are safe. We’ll see them soon and share a smile. Liam and I will be with them soon. “Look!” someone beside me shouts, pointing up. The knight with the canine helmet plummets from the sky, trailing smoke. He lands with a splash in the river thirty meters from us. We all watch the water. He does not reemerge. I look around at the survivors. Not one moves.
&nbs
p; He’s going to drown.
“We gotta help him,” I murmur through chattering teeth. Cold despite the heat. No one looks my way. I say it louder, “We gotta help him.” Still no one moves. “You gutless slags.” I tell Liam to stay put and I stumble to the water, wading out into it until it’s at my neck. Deeper than I thought. I won’t be able to lift him by myself. I curse and look around. Spotting a long length of rope tethering a half dozen of the fishing boats together, I wade back to the boats and unravel the rope, then press back into the depths as the boats drift apart. The current tugs at my waist like a bad dancing partner, threatening to pull me downriver. Soon the water’s over my head. I dive down, looking through the murk for the fallen knight.
I can’t see him.
The silt is so thick I have to surface twice before I find him by luck when my right foot kicks a piece of metal. I trace my feet over the armor, barely able to find the outline of the man. I tie the rope around his leg as best I can with my wrecked shoulder and kick my way back to the surface, trailing the rope behind. When I make it back to the shore, a group of Reds waits to help me, all brave and heroic after I do all the bloody work.
Ten sets of hands tug on the rope till, with a great heave, we manage to drag the knight free of the water and into the shallows.
We hunch over him in the mud. The orange armor is filthy and charred at the abdomen from where something hit him in the air. He’s a giant. Biggest bastard I’ve ever seen. His helmet alone is nearly as large as my torso. The great gauntlets of the armor could squash my head like a pitviper egg. Water pulses out of the holes in the metal. I run my fingers over it, expecting it to be hot for some reason. It’s cold and faintly iridescent.
“Look at the size of him,” someone gasps.
“Has to be a bloodydamn Obsidian.”
“No, they wear white feathers….”
“Is he dead?”
“Blast hit his generator,” an old man says. I think his name is Almor. He was a drillBoy for Delta years ago. He kneels in the mud beside the knight, running his hands over the metal. “PulseShield is off, but means he got no oxygen down there. Could be drowned.”
“We got to get him out,” I say.
“Anyone know how this shit works?” a woman asks, pulling on the helmet. It doesn’t budge.
“Should be an emergency release or somesuch,” Almor says. He fumbles at the jawline. “Here.” With a hiss, the faceplate pops loose. Water pours out. The old man pushes the faceplate back till it bends into itself, revealing the knight’s face. He’s no Obsidian, but he looks carved from granite. A red beard covers his heavy jaw. His head is bald and titanic. And a slim scar stretches down his right cheekbone. His nose is smashed flat and his eyes are small and ringed with delicate eyelashes. He’s a Gold. The first I’ve ever seen with my own eyes. The first any of us have ever seen.
“Is he breathing?” Almor asks.
No one moves toward the knight. Still gutless. I lean over the man and put my ear to his nose. Just then, he spasms. I lurch back in terror as he vomits water. As he hacks, I sink back into the mud, bone tired. Overhead, the sky is torn to shreds as more supersonic ships come from the sky and descend to save the camp.
The Red Hand will retreat, but Camp 121 is burning.
IN A SMALL CORNER BOOTH in a shady back room of a cesspit, two slags are slouched drinking out of dirty glasses like pervy old gargoyles. They look up as I make my way through the neon-green demondust smoke that wafts from the burners of two Red mechanics.
South of Hyperion City Center, hundred sixty klicks from the maple-lined boulevards of the Promenade, towers the brutalist Atlas Interplanetary Docks. There are seven main towers to the AID, each inhuman in its size. Atlas sees one billion travelers pass through his halls every Earth-standard year. But for every new oligarch and old-blood Gold that lands here, there’s a flood of space mariners and interplanetary immigrants and passengers. All these weary travelers crave restaurants, casinos, hotels, and whorehouses before taking transit to whatever their final destination on Luna might be.
It’s a tumor that won’t stop growing; that’s why it’s called the Mass.
Behind me, through the open doorway, electric signs and high-resolution digital flesh fishhook the eyes, pulling travelers from their trams or private aircars. Jerking them headlong into the vestibules of commerce to pump blood and cash into the veins of this hinterland city. It’s the sort of place you go to forget about your life. But, in the irony to end all ironies, it’s where mine began.
The bar looked different back then. I was two years out of the legion and had come to the Mass to burn a few credits with some squaddies from Piraeus. Two drinks in, some idiot spilled a glass of spiked milk down the back of my neck. I swung around to teach the prick some manners, but one look at that goofy face and baggy suit, I started laughing so hard I couldn’t raise a fist. The man stared back at me with a milk mustache and wide, apologetic eyes. Who the hell orders milk in a place like this? The man was young, simple, and two years into the legion from some Earth backwater. We sat and talked in that corner booth and closed the place down. Rest was history.
He was my refuge. My small-town boy with a big heart and a bigger laugh. Jove knows what he saw in me.
“I beg your pardon,” I say to the slags in the corner booth. They eye my rumpled suit, wondering if I’m lost.
