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“Ground floor,” I bark. Thraxa and sixteen others rip downward with me just as glass explodes outward from the second floor. He took a gravLift shaft down. I fire my pulseFist on full auto. Screwface flies underneath, taking slow aim. Chunks of concrete erupt as Lune weaves through our fire and takes off through a canyon of mercantile buildings, heading north.
“Damn, kid can fly,” Thraxa mutters.
“Thank Cassius, the pretty bastard,” Screwface curses.
Is he here too? I pray not. If he’s gone over…
As Lysander gains altitude, I spare a look south of the city to the spaceport. The torchShip I ordered to destroy the Spirit lowers itself midway up the Morning Star’s hull to gain a firing solution. Too slow. Too damn slow. Just blow that EMP to hell. I radio them to shoot through the Morning Star.
Lune’s lead has diminished. We’re barely two hundred meters behind him, close enough to see him looking back over his shoulder at us with the naked eye. He wears light armor and a heavy old helmet.
“What the…” Screwface mutters. “Boss, nine o’clock.”
Lysander’s face blooms in the skyline, a broadcast to all the holoscreens. Not just that. Inside a passing skyscraper, the rooms fill with sudden illumination. The whole city glows with his message. Somehow he hardhacked the feed.
I don’t listen to his words. He’ll be exhorting them to arms, as he watched me do on Phobos so many years ago. The attack will come from the inside first. He’s heading for the prisoner camp in the shadow of the Hippodrome.
Fireballs bloom around the prison camp. Not at the guard towers with their antipersonnel cannons or at the tank garages, but along the walls. Through the billowing smoke, men on fire flail in chaotic dances. From the sky they look like lightning bugs in fog. More explosions go off across the city. Not one near the heavily defended shield generator.
My targeting system registers a lock on Lune’s gravBoots’ thermal signature and I fire my six mini-missiles. Vapor trails scar the air between us as they reel him in. Then he seems to divide, impossibly.
“Bailed out!” Screwface calls.
Lysander’s gravBoots carry on without him as he falls barefoot from the sky. The missiles streak after the boots and detonate with a white flash. Lysander plummets downward end over end before crashing into the central pool of the Water Gardens. We overshoot him and by the time we bank around it is too late. Warning lights appear on my holoDisplay indicating rapidly changing electric and magnetic fields. A black pupil spawns at the center of the Morning Star as the lights of the ships wink out.
Dark is the tide that rolls over the spaceport and the city, swallowing the phalanxes of tanks and Drachenjägers upon the Field of Phaethon. It plunges the office spires, the Hippodrome, the Mound, and the great shield generators into darkness. Above, the iridescent shield that protected us against Atalantia flickers, and then goes off. The glittering cloak of fliers that drifted over the city glitters no more, and the ships become indistinct shadows as they plummet from the sky.
We fall with them.
HELIOPOLIS, CITY OF THE SUN, lies in darkness. Darrow and his Howlers disappear from the sky as their gravBoots fail and they plummet down into shadows. Ships crash across the skyline without the dignity of balls of fire or white flashes from overloading reactors.
I swim to the edge of the pool and jump down to the next level of the fountain, nearly losing hold of the Horn of Helios as I drop down. There’s a terrific crash from above as a troop carrier collides with the head of Poseidon, breaking off his right ear and tearing the carrier in two. One piece slams down into the topmost pool plate. The second spins through the air, passing less than ten meters over my head. Half a hundred men are still strapped into their seats. Their faces pass close enough I can see the acne on a Brown’s forehead before they smash into a building below.
Water rains down on me.
I look up. Over my head, the topmost plate of the Gardens is cracking under the weight of the larger half of the carrier. I jump from the pool to the one beneath just as the topmost plate gives way and a hundred tons of marble and ship smash down on the pool beneath. It becomes an avalanche of stone and water and ship collapsing each plate, gaining on me as I jump frantically down the monument.
I hit the ground level of the plaza and roll, barely outracing the debris that crashes down behind me. Chunks of rock the size of horses roll across the plaza, crumpling the bodies of bystanders and splintering trees. Something hits me hard in the back of the skull and I go sprawling.
Blood leaks down my back when I regain my feet. Dust billows all around. I search until I find the horn. Then I run.
Somehow, running in the darkness through the bedlam, I find the Via Triumphia. Rising legionnaires shout to one another in the black streets. I jump, grab the lip of a low wall, and scramble up till I’m on the rooftops. There I strip open my rucksack and change into lightweight boots. I wrap the loyalist razor around my left arm, and try Alexandar’s better-crafted blade. Its response to my touch is exemplary. The whip cracks as it lashes out to wrap around the metal support of an overhead solar array. I swing out across the gaps between the roofs and toggle the razor into a blade. It releases as it cuts through the array and I land on the other side. More arrays fall behind me as I swing north over the dark streets with the Horn of Helios.
The mayhem of the prison break is illuminated in stuttered flashes of gunfire. With electricity flowing, those prisoners taken in the Battle of the Ladon were at the mercy of the Rising. Now Gold and Obsidian athletes scale the walls and tear their lowColor guards to ribbons with their bare hands.
I keep well clear. I can’t mobilize them in the chaos on foot. Exeter and Glirastes’s servants will have laid the charges on the pen housing my Praetorians. They may already be under way. I’m the laggard here.
I vault another roof, almost impaling myself on a clothesline pole as I head breakneck for the Hippodrome. I was meant to land in the center of the arena, where loyalists would be waiting. But Alexandar ruined my timing and jeopardized my initiative.
Darrow was in pulseArmor. The lack of electrical assistance will paralyze the weaker Howlers under the armor’s weight, but not soldiers like Darrow or Thraxa. He’ll wake in some arcade, or upon some roof, surrounded by chaos from which no man could possibly salvage a victory. But Darrow built his legend on such moments. The EMP wave went farther than expected. I can’t see the lights of Atalantia’s ships in orbit. How far did it go on the ground? How long till she moves more elements in? Given time, Darrow will summon some martial necromancy. So when I come south for his army, it must be with shock and awe.
I use a market stall awning to slow my descent as I swing from the rooftops down to ground level and weave through dead automobiles outside the Hippodrome. “Lune!” I shout as I approach the main pedestrian entry arch at a run.
“Invictus!” someone replies. A dozen midColor loyalists with gas-powered rifles step out of the shadows. They wave me to the left into the arcade beneath the stadium seats where concessions are sold and bets made on race day. Gunpowder weapons crackle in the distance. I find the door to the subterranean stables unlocked. Two Rising sentries lie outside it with holes in their heads. A wall of horse stench hits my nose as I burst from the stairwell into the stables.
Lit by the eerie flames of torches, one of Glirastes’s servants waits for me with a dozen Obsidian stablehands in the proud race-day livery of House Votum. “Hail Lune!” they say, falling to their knees on the straw-strewn floor.
They rise again, staring at me in the low light to tend the anxious herd of saddled sunbloods. None but Obsidians could wrangle such intrepid beasts. I search their eyes. They are barely kin with those who follow Sefi. They know no other life but Mercury. No life but these horses. No life but service. I salute them as they fulfill their noble task and extend my arms for the loyalists to buckle the waiting suit o
