“Like you said, I’m going to the Valkyrie Spires for an army. Orion and you might still have the remnants of my fleet. But we will need more ships than that. Sevro is waiting in the ventilation system of the hangars. When the assault forces land to take back the military spire and the Needles, they’ll leave their shuttles behind in those hangars. Sevro will descend from his hiding place, hijack the shuttles, and return them home to their ships, packed with all the Sons we have left.”
“And you honestly believe you can control the Obsidian?” she asks.
“Not me. Him.” I nod to Ragnar. “They live in fear of their ‘Gods’ in the Board of Quality Control’s Asgard Station. Golds in suits of armor playing at Odin and Freya. Same way that I lived in fear of the Grays in the Pot. As we were cowed by the Proctors. Ragnar’s going to show them just how mortal their Gods really are.”
“How?”
“We will kill them,” Ragnar says. “I have sent friends ahead, months ago, to spread the truth. We will return to my mother and my sister as heroes, and I will tell them their gods are false with my own tongue. I will show them how to fly. I will give them weapons and this ship will carry them to Asgard and we will conquer it as Darrow conquered Olympus. Then we will free the other tribes and carry them away from this land on Quicksilver’s ships.”
“That’s why you have a gorydamn armory back there,” Mustang says.
“What do you think?” I ask her. “Possible?”
“Insane,” she says, awed by the audacity of it. “Might be possible, though. Only if Ragnar can actually control them.”
“I will not control. I will lead.” He says it with quiet certainty.
Mustang admires the man for a moment. “I believe you will.”
I watch Ragnar as he looks back out the window. What passes behind those dark eyes? This is the first time I’ve felt like he’s not telling me something. He already deceived me by releasing Kavax. What else does he plan?
We listen in tense silence to the radio waves crackle with yacht captains requesting docking clearance on the military frigates instead of continuing down to the planet. Connections are used. Bribes offered. Strings pulled. Men weep and beg. These civilians are discovering that their place in the world is smaller than they imagined. They do not matter. In war, men lose what makes them great. Their creativity. Their wisdom. Their joy. All that’s left is their utility. War is not monstrous for making corpses of men so much as it is for making machines of them. And woe to those who have no use in war except to feed the machines.
The Peerless Scarred know this cold truth. And they have trained for centuries for this new age of war. Killing in the Passage. Struggling through the deprivation of the Institute so that they might have worth when war comes. Time for Pixies with deep pockets and expensive tastes to appreciate the realities of life: you do not matter unless you can kill.
The bill, as Lorn often said, comes at the end. Now the Pixies pay.
A Gold Praetor’s voice cuts through the speakers of our ship, ordering the refugee ships to redirect toward authorized transit lanes and steer clear the navy warships or they will be fired upon. The Praetor cannot afford unauthorized vessels within one hundred kilometers of her ship. They could carry bombs. Could carry Sons of Ares. Two yachts ignore the warnings and are ripped apart as one of the cruisers fires railguns into their hulls. The Praetor repeats her order. This time it is obeyed. I look over at Mustang and wonder what she thinks of this. Of me. Wishing we could be somewhere quiet where a thousand things didn’t pull at us. Where I ask about her instead of the war.
“Feels like the end of the world,” she says.
“No.” I shake my head. “It is the beginning of a new one. I have to believe that.”
The planetscape below is blue and spackled white as we pretend to follow the designated coordinates along the western hemisphere at the equator. Tiny green islands ringed with tan beaches wink up at us from the indigo waters of the Thermic Sea. Beneath, ships jerk and burn as they hit atmosphere before us. Like phosphorous firecrackers Eo and I played with as children, kicking spasmodically and glowing orange, then blue, as heat friction builds along their shields. Our Blue veers us away, following a series of other ships who depart the general flow of traffic for their own homes.
Soon, Phobos is half a planet away. The continents pass beneath. One by one the other ships descend and we’re left alone on our journey to the uncivilized pole, flying past several dozen Society satellites that monitor the southernmost continent. They too have been hacked into recycling information pulled from three years ago. We’re invisible, for now. Not just to our enemies but to our friends. Mustang leans from her chair, peering up into the cockpit. “What is that?” She gestures to the sensor display. A single dot follows behind us.
“Another refugee ship from Phobos,” the pilot answers. “Civilian vessel. No weapons.” But it’s closing fast. Trailing behind us by two hundred kilometers.
“If it’s a civilian vessel, why did it just appear on our sensors?” Mustang asks.
“It could have sensor shielding. Dampeners,” Holiday says warily.
The ship closes to forty kilometers. Something is wrong here. “Civilian vessels don’t have that sort of acceleration,” Mustang says.
“Dive,” I say. “Get us through the atmosphere now. Holiday on the gun.”
The Blue slips into defense protocols, increasing our speed, strengthening our rear shields. We hit atmosphere. My teeth rattle together. The ship’s electronic voice suggests passengers find their seats. Holiday stumbles up, rushing past us to the tailgun. Then a warning siren trills as the ship behind us morphs on the radar display, sharp contours of hidden weapons blossoming from its formerly smooth hull. It follows us into atmosphere, and it fires.
Our pilot twists her thin hands in the gel controls. My stomach lurches. Hypersonic depleted uranium shells scar the canvas of clouds and icy terrain, superheating as they streak past. The ship jerks as we hit atmosphere ourselves. Our pilot continues to juke, twitching her fingers in the electric gel, face placid and lost in her dance with the pursuing craft. Her eyes distant from her body. A single droplet of sweat beading on her right temple and trickling down her jaw. Then a gray blur rips into the cockpit and she explodes in a shower of meat. Spattering the viewports and my face with blood. The uranium shell takes off the top half of her body, then rips through the floor. A second shell the size of a child’s head screams through the ship between Mustang and me. Punching a hole in the floor and ceiling. Wind shrieks. Emergency masks fall into our laps. Warning sirens warble as pressure rushes from our ship, whipping our hair. I see the blackness of the ocean through the hole in the floor. Stars through the hole in the ceiling as our oxygen leaks out. The pursuing ship continues to fire into our dying ship. I huddle in terror with my hands over my head, teeth locked together, everything human in me screaming.