by Ada Harper
Virgil’s eyes narrowed. Olivia’s smile grew. And the lights went out.
It was a disadvantage to try to fight three altus soldiers after being scruffed. It was a disadvantage to fight from her knees, with drugs racing through her system. It was a disadvantage to fight weaponless, beaten. It was a disadvantage to fight in the near-complete darkness of the room. But recent experience gave her a single advantage as a caricae.
She knew exactly where an opponent would strike first.
“Scruff her.”
But Olivia had already begun to move. She grabbed the hand that reached for her neck and yanked, twisting the first guard over her shoulder. A muffled grunt said he’d landed just where Virgil had been, but he wouldn’t stay down. The adrenaline shot had poured panic and energy into Olivia’s nerves since she was scruffed. She released it to her toes now and sprang to her feet.
Guards. One at her shoulder, others two steps adjacent. She couldn’t rely on them holding their positions, but she could rely on at least one rushing her. Heavy steps not quite cushioned by carpet. She pivoted, catching a knee and bringing him down. She came up with his gun and fired once into where he landed. She had no idea whether the sidearm had been set to a stun setting or a full charge, but she couldn’t feel guilty about it. The shot gave away her location. She dove away.
Sabine, three steps forward. She’s out of commission. Couch, four steps wide, waist high.
A fist caught her low, forcing the air out of her. Olivia twisted and lashed out, but a hand caught a bit of her hair. Too close, too close to her nape. She jerked her head back, sacrificing the hair with a painful yank and shooting blindly. A howl said her luck held. She dove for the couch again, this time finding Sabine’s bare feet in the dark.
Olivia braced against twitching limbs and hoisted the ruler of the largest empire on the planet over the side of the couch. A hard thud signaled she’d succeeded. A shriek through clenched teeth signaled she’d either be forgiven or executed when this was done. She dove to the floor again, sensing a scuff of carpet behind her.
Metal knickknack on end table. Looks too light to wield but it has a sharp edge. One step from couch.
She came up swinging with it. A startled curse gave her a direction to shoot in. She heard a chair turn over, someone scrambling for the window. Three steps behind the couch, curtains drawn. She twisted and had her gun raised when the generator kicked on and lights flooded the room again.
The light was blinding after the fever-pitched dark. Olivia struggled not to wince. At the end of her gun sight, Virgil crouched over the empress’s prone form. Olivia aimed.
“By all means, approach. I already took one eye, I would be happy to show you the other.”
Olivia stopped. Sabine was still locked in that torturous pose, jaw stiff under Virgil’s fingers. The tip of his thumb hovered under her open eye, angled at just the right position to sink into her socket. Olivia felt sick. Sabine’s gaze was furious, daring. The blasted woman was willing to sacrifice her own eyes to spite an enemy. It was a familiar look. Perhaps she had something in common, after all.
Olivia put a bolt of blue through Virgil’s arm. His hand spasmed, but missed Sabine’s eye. She had just the time to enjoy the outrage—he’d expected her to talk, really?—before he went boneless to the floor.
The empress hit the floor shortly after him. Hard. Another bruise Olivia was certain she’d pay for later.
Chapter Twenty-Four
In Galen’s defense, the building crept up on him. Galen had been shoved out of the shuttle and then the shuttle had been shoved out of the sky, and the town—once-winking lights spread out far below—rushed up at him as his chute deployed. It was only when he opened his eyes again and saw stars through a fractured ceiling he was aware he’d landed. The shifting shimmer of his chute was tangled in the rafters but his gun was still, somehow, gripped in his hands.
Adrenaline pushed him to his knees. He touched wincingly where his shoulder had taken the brunt of the harsh landing. His aunt the general had once said that the only thing a good altus soldier required was a thick skull. It appeared he’d passed that criteria at least. His head ached but held together as he took inventory of his surroundings.
The air tasted like carbon oil and concrete dust. He’d crashed through the half-blasted roof of an upstairs apartment. It was a prefab, an Imperial version of the rundown apartment Olivia had retreated to in the Syn, if a few steps up on the poverty ladder. It seemed abandoned and still, but he could hear gunfire like a static pulse in the streets below. That alone worried him—they hadn’t had intelligence of any cities in all-out combat between Chrysanthine and the rally point, but even more concerning was the quiet outside of that. They’d been shot down over a settlement, and it couldn’t be far from Meteore. There should be shouting, rescue personnel, or even soldiers, and that layered on top of the normal buzz and thrum of city life. The fact that there was no sound of civilian activity said that this town had already ceased being a place to live and had become a place to cower, to survive or die.
Galen rolled to his feet as quietly as possible. He found the controls for his chute and quickly pushed the button to begin its disintegration sequence. In minutes the silver fabric would be dust. Prudent, but if this attack was planned it was likely he’d already been spotted coming down. He took stock of his gear before moving across cracked tile toward the door.
The apartment he was in had been abandoned quickly; clothes left on the bed, dishes by the sink, personal slates left on coffee tables. The building had no AI interface, which immediately told him it was older. Every tenant in a larger city would have demanded modern conveniences like CHARIS. Some of the smaller towns sported only a couple standard prefabs clustered around a transport pad, but he’d got the impression this was bigger as the ground rushed up at him. He tried to sort through what that told him about their location, but they’d been crossing several districts to the rally point and, shameful as it was, Galen’s mind had been far away during the flight, still in Ameranthe.
He made silent progress, checking each hallway and stairwell as he made his way down, but encountering no one until he reached the street. The street was a maze of concrete, buildings crumpled like fallen cakes of rubble. He couldn’t see more than two blocks in any direction. Later, he’d have time to be alarmed; they weren’t supposed to be flying over insurrection-held cities. But this indicated large-scale firepower, and if the red scorch marks on the nearby walls could be trusted, firepower from Syn-made weapons.
This was more than just a coup. The relief that would be needed to recover was immense. Galen spared a thought for how long it would take people to rebuild, and the things that couldn’t be: lives, history, peace of mind.
But that was for a later Galen. A noble, ruling Galen. The present Galen could only mentally readjust his expectations of combat. It was a swift calculation, a mental ticking over of statistics and prepared scenarios. He’d been playing strategy and war games his entire childhood, long before earning a reputation in the military. It was an easy mindset to slip into. He almost welcomed the distance, the narrowing of thoughts.
He needed to find his people. Lyre and her scouts had been wearing their aetheric cloaks, which would have given them more control in the jump than Galen had with his emergency chute. They were likely holed up elsewhere in the city. The wisest course would be to avoid engaging, locate his soldiers, determine the nearest safe place to rally and assess the situation. He had a plan of action then. He felt a familiar tension ease across his shoulders, senses tuned for that first snap of blastfire.
He heard voices instead. A static click of an aetheric comms. He faded against an alley wall, eyes already searching out cover. The voices were indistinct, muted, but the words were Quillian.
A search team picked its way up the street with a trained discipline. Imperial trained discipline, Galen noted it with a stab of grief.
Not Syn mercenaries. It was one thing to assume there were some nobles in the court plotting your downfall, but seeing your own soldiers warring in an Imperial city was an oilier kind of betrayal. He didn’t want to engage them, but they’d come geared to fight militia and invaders, not subdue their own men.
Knowing they were his own men meant he knew how they would clear each building, methodically and carefully. Imperial forces were impeccably trained. But impeccably trained meant impeccably predictable, to those who trained them. Galen faded backward into the alley, quickly picking a path that allowed him to avoid the roving troops until he could find Lyre and the surviving scouts.
Galen was already mentally planning notes for Lyre on how they would have to alter their unit training to make such avoidance impossible in the future when the soldiers he’d been shadowing stopped and moved into a combat formation.
Instinct pulled Galen’s gaze farther down the street. He would have missed it if he hadn’t been looking for it, a whisper of movement in the shadow of a hollowed-out building. A nose of a rifle gleamed, but didn’t fire.
The enemy soldiers he’d been following had walked into a trap, but it was a trap made for sniping, for single stragglers. Not a full combat complement. Anyone pinned down at this close range, with those odds, wouldn’t have a chance. At least, not without an element of surprise.
Galen moved, pulling a cluster of shots that downed the nearest three soldiers. His ally seemed to have been waiting for him, because shots rang out over his head as he threw himself at a fourth. By the time he stood again, the remaining enemies were bleeding out on the ground. It was only then that Galen detected the shiver of metal and a multitude of guns pointed at him. Perhaps the sniper hadn’t been as pinned down as he thought. He sighed and straightened warily. He took a guess. “Lyre.”
Dust drifted down from the rubble. Galen felt an exasperated kind of relief when Lyre’s familiar bush of dark hair surfaced. She gave a whistle and the riflesights dropped away as she skidded down the rubble to him. “Thanks for the distraction, your Grace.”
“I thought I was rescuing a wounded sniper,” Galen confessed.
“That’s what they thought, too.” Lyre gestured to the new dead and grinned. “And look at you: in one piece. Glad to see a broken heart hasn’t made ya sloppy.”
Galen’s already thin mood soured. He knew she couldn’t resist seeing a sore spot without poking at it, but he didn’t need any help torturing himself on that point. “Lyre.”
She was already walking back to the shadows of the bombed-out building, only a couple scouts peeling out of hiding to watch her back. Galen sighed and followed. They ducked into the building and Galen realized where the rest of the scouts had gone. Injured soldiers camped along the walls of the second floor. Not everyone had made a clean escape from the shuttle, and as Galen counted over the faces he realized with a pit in his stomach how many they’d lost.
“While we were waiting for you to show up, I got bored. I already did some scouting,” Lyre said when he turned to her again.
“And?”
“Excepting our good traitor friends, the streets are deserted, as you’d expect. It looks like they used an initial invasion and low-impact bombs to drive out the population and then...” Lyre gave an uncharacteristic pause. Her lips pursed in a bloodless look of distaste. “You should see this.”
It wasn’t often that Lyre let her smirking, in-the-know facade fall, especially when away from Court. Curious, Galen followed. She muttered a word to her captains and then led Galen down a series of alleyways that felt like they led away from the city core. They easily avoided engaging anyone, but the rubble of buildings intensified. Galen was eventually forced to crawl and scuttle over dangerously tilted sections of pulverized concrete that shifted and snared at his feet.
“This doesn’t look like low-impact bombs to me,” he muttered after nearly losing his foot to a falling support strut. The buildings around them were quickly turning to permacrete quicksand.
“It’s not. The low-impact bombs were just phase one.”
The swell of what had been a tall condo tower had created a small rise of rubble. They crested it, and Galen nearly staggered. Heat hit his face, the sucking, air-warping kind of heat you got when you got too close to shuttle engines on cooldown.
Lyre shot an arm out to steady him, face grim as ash. “That’s phase two.”
She nodded over the rise. Galen had to squint against the heat. It took his brain a moment to come to terms with it. The map they had of the city said they should have been looking over a residential sprawl. The visuals Lyre had pulled up had depicted it as a rolling field of well-maintained apartment towers intermixed with art buildings, museums, theaters. Nothing so established as the architecture you’d see in Chrysanthine, but there should have been a skyline of thick, ornate buildings towering over them; the Empire built nothing temporary.
Instead there was sand. Red sand. The heat coming off it warned Galen off from touching it, but only the occasional skeleton of metal poked up through the shifting dunes. Bits of aetheric shards gleamed, like seashells on a beach. On the far side, he could make out the imposing shapes of aircraft and cannons amid the trees, but it was a no-man’s-land of death between them.
Galen’s breath felt trapped between his ribs. A mix of anger and horror. “What...what could do this?”
“Nothing Imperial, that’s for sure.” Lyre spat, and it sizzled into nothing where it hit the sand. “We heard rumblings of the Syns cooking up a new weapon but this...”
“Did the residents get out?”
“I suspect that was what the initial bombing was designed to do—fewer variables for them to manage—but...” Lyre trailed off, glowering at the wasteland as if it personally offended her. “Anything left in there is dust now.”
Galen took a breath, and with effort convinced his brain not to imagine it. Not right now. Later, like Olivia would have said. He understood now what it took to pack away the helplessness. It wasn’t a feeling he was used to, and he briefly marveled how Olivia kept moving through it. “They didn’t strike the city center.”
“Nope. Appears they saved that for us. Got us well and good trapped, too. Rough count is they’ve got us outnumbered ten to one. We’ve got no shuttle, and no one’s crossing that shit on foot without being spotted.”
Escape had fallen so far down his priorities that Galen only distantly pinned the problem for later.
“Course—” Lyre brightened, with that ghastly cheer she sometimes had “—that means we’ll see them coming, too.”
The wind picked up, and Galen finally turned away from the scorched rubble. “First we need a base we can hold. I want the city,” he said finally. His muscles were already sore from the day’s fighting and protested as he slung his rifle again. He ignored it; the day was about to get longer. “Take it.”
Lyre’s smile was sickle sharp in the slanted light. They returned to their people.
Things went quickly from there. They only had a few dozen loyal scouts, fewer than that uninjured, but they organized into small strike teams and flickered through the remaining city like ravens in shadow. Lyre’s scouts effortlessly harassed and herded the enemy forces into the waiting fire of Galen’s soldiers. Eventually, the enemy surrounding the city stopped sending in new teams. It was a temporary respite, but they’d make the most of it.
They set up a ramshackle command in the city’s former security barracks near city hall. It was cold, empty of comforts, but clear views and the only building left in the city center made to stand up to an assault. Galen made quick work of setting up skeleton patrols and giving the wounded finally a chance to be treated and rest. By the time dawn sent a crimson glow off the wasteland surrounding them, they had some measure of a base.
It went smoothly; too smoothly. He felt their time ticking away. So Galen was about expecting it when Lyre found him with mor
e bad news. He’d retreated to the edge of the remaining city again, looking out over the impossible red wastes. He stood in the shadow of a building to avoid snipers, contemplating the still shadows of war machines on the far side.
“Status?” Galen asked as Lyre appeared at his elbow. Silent as usual, but he could feel the grim unease she had in the way she bracketed her shoulder against the wall.
“Rations will last us a few days, but I doubt we last that long. City’s clear, for now.” She sniffed, rubbing a handful of red sand between her fingers now that it had cooled enough to touch. Galen had a hard time not staring. The grit had been someone’s home, someone’s life, now clogged under their fingernails. “Our new friends aren’t talking, of course.”
They’d managed to drag a couple of the enemy soldiers back alive for questioning. In their Imperial uniforms, Galen’s stomach had turned at thinking of them as enemies. Syndicate mercenaries had been one thing but...what this war would be, if they allowed it, it’d be a snake eating its own tail. The thought horrified, and Galen chose instead to focus on the way Lyre’s other hand clutched into a fist. “But you found something else?”
“Sometimes a soldier’s pockets talk for them.” Lyre opened her hand. “Found these on both the living and the dead. Look familiar?”
Aetheric crystal glinted. It was the same small, strange little spheres that he and Olivia had found on mercenaries in the Caeweld. It confirmed that there was in fact a collaboration underway with traitors in the Empire and factions in the Syn, but a glint of metal made Galen frown. He leaned closer. “A transmitter?”
“Maybe. We found this one on a unit leader—the rest were empty. Damned if they’ll tell us more than that.” Lyre sounded uncharacteristically stymied and she frowned at the small shards. “It’s Syn make, and no techs survived the crash to identify it better than that. But Syn tech embedded inside Imperial aether crystal can’t be good.”