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ll him I want to speak with him in the hangar. Once he’s away from the machine, stun him, strip him naked, scan him for embeds, and put him in a cell with a full century standing guard. No one is to speak with him until I get there. If he tries to touch anything unusual between this moment and then, shoot him in the head. Then order an evacuation of all support personnel to the ships. I want everyone except combat ready to go.” I take a breath. “Then get a particle beam pointed at the Spirit of Faran and blow that EMP to hell.”
There’s a pause.
“Copy that. What’s what?”
“Patching a pool.” I use my master controls over my Howlers’ network as I run, cutting out Alexandar and Rhonna. Colloway joins from the confines of his isolation chamber. Thraxa storms down the hall to link up with me. Harnassus joins as he walks a complaining Glirastes out to the hangar. When the rest of the pool has joined from all across Heliopolis, I inform them and my private horror becomes real: “An omega-level enemy asset has been discovered inside the city. Glirastes has flipped. That EMP is for us. I’ve ordered its destruction. But it will be coordinated with an outside assault. Prepare for heavy enemy contact. Attack is imminent.”
Should I call Rhonna and Alexandar? Will it tip my enemy off? If I don’t, he could take either of them hostage, or kill them if he hears us coming. I have to risk it and trust their discretion. Even then, if anyone could take down a single man, it’s Alexandar. I use my master command to turn on both of their cochlear implants. Rhonna is laughing and admiring the Water Colossus. “Do not react. A Howler strike team is on its way to your location. The man you are sitting across from is not named Cato au Vitruvius. He is Lysander au Lune. Wait for us. Do not engage him on your own.”
“WHEN I FIRST SAW the Water Colossus, I thought nothing could be that big.” Rhonna admires the ten-meter-tall model inside Glirastes’s museum to himself. “But then I thought I’d never seen anything as big as Tinos, or the Citadel of Light, or the Morning Star. That shit nearly dropped my jaw. There’s always something bigger, ain’t there?” She is much like her name, which means “rough island” in ancient Gaelic. I doubt she knows how apt a name it is. The young Red wants to be inviting, but just can’t help being jagged around the edges.
Alexandar does not notice the jaggedness one bit.
Starlight filters through the glass dome, the light of certain stars amplified to cast columns of light over the models. From his recline on a bench, Alexandar sips his sherry and gazes at the rough island as if she were the monument itself.
Their unspoken tenderness seems already so frail to me.
Before the Ash Rain, it wouldn’t have.
“Nothing is as big as the Morning Star, my goodlady, except the ego of a Valii-Rath,” Alexandar says, enjoying his role as tour guide. It seems his education stumbled during his house’s sojourn from Mars to Io to Luna to rebels. Even in my anxiousness to depart, I remind myself to be civil and correct none of his errors. “It took seven years to build. Dozens of asteroids. But most of its metal came from the mines of Mercury.”
Wrong.
Gods, how long do they intend to loiter? I hide my vexation. My men will already be in motion. Glirastes preparing his program. I must get to the Hippodrome. But most galling of all, my two guests are becoming rude in their lingering. If this is what passes for Martian manners, I shudder to think of what Virginia has done to the Palatine.
My cousin’s enthusiasm for seeing me again has made it impossible to extract myself from their company. Something must be done. And soon. Yet a fresh variable rears its ugly head. I’ve unfortunately noticed Alexandar no longer tongues his new teeth as he did when he arrived.
“From the mines here? No shit. Shipping fees must have put Octavia in her early grave,” Rhonna says with a folksy whistle. “Costs me half a month’s pay just to send a kilogram of loot back to Mars. How’m I supposed to get my cigars home?” She glances at me with a grin. “Raided the Votum vault, I did. You’re looking at the only purveyor of Heliopolitan cigars in all Agea. Well, soon as we skip this rock and make like pups for home, that is.”
She downs her glass, leaving fingerprints all over the bulb. Darrow’s stock, indeed. Her other hand hangs idle at her side, no longer exhibiting the tic of playing with the leather thong of her sidearm’s holster. This, along with Alexandar’s diminished self-dentistry, has turned me cold. I probe with the Mind’s Eye.
“Octavia made the people of Mars subsidize it,” Alexandar explains. “She wanted the Rim to build a flagship paid for by Mars just to mock us. Especially after Darrow purloined the Pax.”
“Not exactly true,” I say. “Octavia commissioned it four years before the Vanguard was stolen. She paid the Julii trading company the shipping fees using the tariff revenues levied on Nero au Augustus’s helium exports from his mines, which your grandfather, Alexandar, watched him steal from his sworn ArchGovernor. The Rising plutocrats were willing beneficiaries of the Society before they tired of it. In fact.” I look at Rhonna. “How many mines did your family own, Alexandar?”
He smiles pleasantly back. “Oh, far fewer than yours, I assume.”
I affect a yawn, and then resort to violence.
I seize Rhonna’s left wrist and jerk her toward me, so that my tight jab shatters her jaw. In the same movement, I pull her slack body to me, strip her sidearm, and put it to her temple. The tip of Alexandar’s whip stops taut less than a centimeter from my right eye.
He recalls it in a beautiful maneuver that has him poised for the Falling Leaf, a winding corkscrew of a downward slash. He shows remarkable mastery of one of the Willow Way’s more complicated strikes by freezing halfway into the third motion.
His eyes stare at the gun I hold to Rhonna’s head.
In the moment, there is no rage for me in my cousin’s eyes. Only fear for her.
I do not want to shoot Alexandar. I found no fault with him in the mountains. Nor with his valor in the chase, nor his humble heroism at Tyche. But the man he serves is a plague. And he is just a noble symptom far too loyal for his own good.
I point the gun at him and let Rhonna fall unconscious to the floor.
“Lune,” he says.
“Arcos. I see Lorn gifted you the Willow after all.”
“Bold of you to say my grandfather’s name after what Octavia did to him. You recall, yes? How she had Lilath au Faran saw through his spine? From behind, like this…” He slowly moves his blade back and forth. “All my life I was compared to you. Cousin Lysander. Perfect Lysander.” He looks me up and down. “You must be more than meets the eye.”
“Put down the blade and get on your knees,” I say.
