Morning Star

The Howlers pitch back their heads and howl like maniacs. What comes next is a blur of kaleidoscopic oddities. Music thumps from somewhere. We’re kept on our knees. Hands tied. The Howlers rush forward. Bottles are brought to our lips and we chug as they chant around some weird looping melody that Sevro leads with bawdy aplomb. Ragnar roars with satisfaction when I finish the bottle they bring me. I almost puke then and there. The liquor burns, scouring my esophagus and belly. Victra’s coughing behind me. Holiday just chugs on and the Howlers cheer as she finishes her bottle. We waver there as they surround Victra, chanting as she gasps and tries to finish the liquor. It splashes over her face. She coughs.

“Is that your best, daughter of the Sun?” Ragnar bellows. “Drink!”

Ragnar roars with delight when she finally finishes the swill, coughing and muttering curses. “Bring forth the snakes and the cockroaches!” he shouts.

They chant like priests as Pebble wobbles forward with a bucket. They push us together so we surround the bucket and in the wavering light can see the bottom of it wriggling with life. Thick, shiny cockroaches with hairy legs and wings crawl around a pitviper. I reel back, terrified and drunk as our binds are cut. Holiday’s already reached inside and grabs the snake; she slams it on the floor till it dies.

Victra just stares at the Gray. “What the…”

“Finish the bucket or get the box,” Sevro says.

“What does that even mean?”

“Finish the bucket or get the box! Finish the bucket or get the box!” they chant. Holiday takes a bite of the dead snake, tearing into it with her teeth.

“Yes!” Ragnar bellows. “She has the soul of a Howler. Yes!”

I’m so drunk I can barely see. I reach into the bucket, shivering as I feel the cockroaches crawl over my hand. I snatch one up and jam it into my mouth. It’s still moving. I force my jaw to chew. I’m almost crying. Victra is gagging at the sight of me. I swallow it down and grab her hand and force it into the bucket. She makes a sudden lurching movement, and I’m too slow to realize what it means. Her vomit splashes onto my shoulder. At the smell of it, I can’t hold my own in. Holiday chews on. Ragnar shouts her praises.

By the time we finish the bucket, we’re a huddled pathetic mass of drunk, bug- and guts-covered filth. Sevro’s saying something in front of us. Keeps swaying back and forth. Maybe that’s me. Is he talking? Someone shakes my shoulder from behind. Was I asleep? “This is our sacred text,” my little friend is saying. “You will study this sacred text. Soon you will know this sacred text inside and out. But today, you need know only Howler Rule One.”

“Never bow,” Ragnar says.

“Never bow,” the rest echo and Clown steps forward with three wolfcloaks. Like the fur of the wolves at the Institute, these pelts modulate to their environment and take on a dark hue in the candlelit room. He holds one out for Victra. They free her bonds and she tries to stand, but can’t. Pebble reaches to help her up, but Victra ignores the hand. Tries again and tilts down to a knee. Then Sevro kneels beside her and extends a hand. Looking at it through sweat-soaked hair, Victra snorts out a laugh as she realizes what this is about. She takes his hand, and only with his help can she walk steadily enough to take her cloak. Sevro takes it from Clown and drapes it around her bare shoulders. Their eyes meet and linger for a moment before they move to the side so Holiday can be helped up by Pebble to gain her cloak. Ragnar helps me, draping mine over my shoulders.

“Welcome, brother and sisters, to the Howlers.”

Together, the Howlers pitch back their heads and let loose a mighty howl. I join them, and find to my surprise that Victra does as well. Hurling her head back in the darkness without reservations. Then suddenly the lights flare on. The howls die as we look around in confusion. Dancer trudges into the showers with Uncle Narol.

“The bloodyhell is this?” Narol asks, eying the cockroaches and the remains of the snake and the bottles. The Howlers look at the ludicrousness of one another awkwardly.

“We’re performing a secret occult ritual,” Sevro says. “And you are interrupting, subordinate.”

“Right,” Narol says, nodding, a little disturbed. “Sorry, sir.”

“One of our Pinks stole a datapad from a Bonerider in Agea,” Dancer says to Sevro, not amused by the display. “We found out who he is.”

“No shit?” Sevro says. “Was I right?”

“Who?” I ask, drunkenly. “Who are you talking about?”

“The Jackal’s silent partner,” Dancer says. “It’s Quicksilver. You were right, Sevro. Our agents say he’s at his corporate headquarters on Phobos, but he won’t be for long. He’s bound for Luna in two days. We won’t be able to touch him there.”

“So Operation Black Market is a go,” Sevro says.

“It’s a go,” Dancer admits reluctantly.

Sevro pumps his fist in the air. “Hell, yeah. You heard the man, Howlers. Get scrubbed. Get sober. Get fed. We’ve got a Silver to kidnap and an economy to crash.” He looks at me with a wild grin on his face. “It’s gonna be a hell of a day. A hell of a day.”

Phobos means fear. In myth, he was the offspring of Aphrodite and Ares, the child of love and war. It’s a fitting name for the larger of Mars’s moons.

Formed long before the age of man, when a meteorite struck father Mars and flung debris into orbit, the oblong moon floated like a cast-off corpse, dead and abandoned for a billion years. Now it is the Hive teeming with the parasitic life that pumps blood into the veins of the Gold empire. Swarms of tiny, fat-bodied cargo ships rise from Mars’s surface to funnel into the two huge gray docks that encircle the moon. There, they transfer the bounty of Mars to the kilometer-long cosmosHaulers that will bear the treasure along the great Julii-Agos trade routes to the Rim or, more likely, to the Core, where hungry Luna waits to be fed.

The barren rock of Phobos has been carved hollow by man and wreathed with metal. With a radius of only twelve kilometers at its widest, the moon is ringed by two huge dockyards, which run perpendicular to each other. They’re dark metal with white glyphs and blinking red lights for docking ships. They slither with the movement of magnetic trams and cargo vessels. Beneath the dockyards, and at times rising around them in the form of spiked towers, is the Hive—a jigsaw city formed not by neoclassical Gold ideals, but by raw economics without the confines of gravity. Six centuries’ worth of buildings perforate Phobos. It is the largest pincushion man has ever built. And the disparity of wealth between the inhabitants of the Needles, the tips of the buildings, and the Hollow inside the moon’s rock, borders on hilarious.