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I can only imagine they’re doing the same to my downed men all over Heliopolis. Lysander has woken the sleeping giant that we kept alive with our meds. But beyond the screaming mob, the sky is black and empty of Atalantia’s ships. Did the EMP reach all the way to orbit? I see no dreadnought lights above.
My ships will be dead at the spaceport. Our shield down.
This is the end, but I refuse to let the mob swallow me like it did my wife.
The mob clears except for those holding me down while several lowColors stagger over with a block of masonry the size of a man. They hold it over my head and drop it. A ringing fills my ears from the internal concussion. The reinforced warhelm dents but does not break. They get clever and drag me toward the local park, making a hideous parade, where they hold me down before a tall headless statue of a Votum ancestor. They tie electrical cables around my arms and legs, and four teams pull my body taut as the rest of them loop the cable around the neck of the statue and begin to heave. It rocks on its pedestal, each heave bringing it closer and closer to its tipping point, after which several tons of marble will fall and test the metalworking of Martian forges. I wait as the four teams on my limbs strain and sweat, pulling against what they think is my strength, but is actually the reinforced skeleton of the armor. They waste their effort. I save mine for one desperate gambit.
When the statue finally tips forward with a cheer from the mob, I roar and jerk as hard as I can with my right leg and right arm. The sudden force sends the teams of men stumbling forward, impossibly off balance. Then I see why. Several young Heliopolitan Reds smash into them from behind, knocking them off their feet. Still they don’t let go of the line. In a sudden explosion of pure force, the muscles of my right leg and right arm pull for everything they’re worth against their teams. They’re jolted forward, even as the men on the left keep pulling, helping me drag them into the path of the teetering statue.
The timing is almost comedic.
Several tons of stone make wet boneless sacks of men. The teams on the left stop pulling, suddenly appalled by the sight of pulverized men and the bath of gore it entails. It is nothing to me. I unravel myself and stand in the dead heavy armor.
That they are not the same mob that butchered Daxo and mutilated my wife does not matter. I kill them all.
The Brown street cleaner rushes for me with his piece of rebar. My punch is slowed by the weight of my
unpowered armor, but not by much, and I am still the war god Mickey carved using all his infernal devices. I need no razor for this mindless dreck. This man is tiny. My metal fist collapses the side of his skull and shatters vertebrae. I lift the Silver who kicked my groin by his throat and squeeze until I feel spine. I shatter a man’s femur with a stomp, and collapse his sternum into his heart as I march over him to break a woman’s jaw. Rib cages crackle under armored boots like twigs as I tread through them in systematic slaughter.
As a mob they were a single organism. In fear, they divide. In death, they become lonely as I weave them into my twitching meat carpet.
When all have fled or died, there is no one left to kill but a convulsing Silver boy who huddles by what remains of his father underneath the statue. One sight of his wide eyes and slack jaw and desperate begging stops me like a wall. Seeing myself through his eyes, I am disgusted. So I wheel away back into my world.
The Reds who came to my aid stand watching me. There are six of the sunbaked laborers. Not a one older than twenty. They stand with their fists in a salute. I open an external pouch manually and find the helm key. I insert it into the collar until a latch pops. I roll back the wolf’s head helm and suck down the fresh air. The young Reds stare up at me. They might have thought they recognized my armor before, but now they see my face, and they take a step back in fear.
“I lost my razor on the rooftops. Find it.”
By the time the skinniest of them returns with my slingBlade in his trembling hands, another crowd has formed down the street. They’re trying to decide whether it’s worth rushing me. I take the blade from the boy. They see its shape. They run.
I nod to the Red and, weighed down by forty kilos of dead armor, rush to find my men.
My miracle has turned into bedlam.
Heliopolis is in chaos. Screams drift over the city. The streets are pitch dark. Gunshots crackle from conventional arms. Downed ships smolder and send black clouds of smoke twirling up into the darkness. Bands of citizens armed with improvised weapons answer Lune’s call and begin to rove the streets, dragging sympathizers from their doorways to stab metal in their guts or cave their heads in with rocks. A band of rubble-armed Heliopolitan highColors eyes me down a boulevard before carrying on, looking for easier kills. Each street is a new horror. I watch from a stone balcony looking down into an arcade as one of my citizen outreach patrols is cornered by a mob. With their pulseRifles dead, they have only their long utility knives to protect them. The mob keeps their distance and stones them to death before I can find a way down.
I encounter bands of my men and frantic stragglers in the streets. Six have conventional weapons. By the empty magazine pouches, I see they’ve been using them. Most stragglers come from downed ships or local strongpoints. Panic grips the army. When they hold their ground, armies suffer, but when they retreat hysterically they die. We can’t all retreat at the same time. Guessing Lysander’s force, when it comes, will cut off my two million support troopers billeted in the city, I order a Red centurion to send runners to the other strongpoints and tell them to marshal at the Water Plaza.
I follow the directions of a medicus who says he saw the Howlers forming up in a square nearby. Before I make it there, I’m drawn by the glow of a fire in the mouth of an alleyway.
Turning the corner, I find a gang of highColor youths standing over someone in armor, dumping mechanical oil on the blaze they’ve set. They take off running when they see me. I look around the alley for something to put out the blaze. Shouting comes from the street. Three White Fleet pilots, bleeding from a crash landing, tear around the corner, chased by a dozen men with clubs and a young Gold with his heirloom family razor. They skid to a stop as they see me standing there covered in blood. I pull my razor and they run.
They’ll find more of my men, so I hunt them down. In the armor, I’m too slow to catch the Gold and a Red, but I kill the rest from behind.
The pilots have put out the blaze by the time I return. I brush the sand they piled on Thraxa’s armor and twist the hidden emergency release. She’s not breathing. The flames would have prevented oxygen from entering her helmet. I perform mouth-to-mouth until she gasps against me.
“I’m prime,” she says, eyes still wild. “I’m prime. Get off.” She sits up in a daze and looks around at the darkness in ill temper. “That little odious shit. The ships?”
“Dead. Seems the EMP hit orbit too. No telling the range.”
“I’ll wring that overbred prat’s neck!”
“We got to find him first.”
I help her to her feet and she staggers with the pilots and me to the square. We find Screwface and most of the other Howlers giving orders to several thousand infantry from a dozen different legions.
“Boss!” Screwface shouts over the chaos. He rushes to me.
“What’s what?” I ask as Thraxa helps me roll open my helmet.
