“Now,” I tell Daxo.
“LIONHEART!”
…and death for four meters.
He cleaves the Red with the scorcher in half with the edge of the Dawn Scepter’s star. A man swings at him with a knife. Daxo is already past him, but reaches back to shatter his hand and take the knife. He wheels it down on the head of a Brown in a hammer stroke, flattening the head, and then casually flicks the scepter back into and through the face of another man before bringing it about in a wheeling stroke that shatters three more of the rioters. He kicks a Brown woman in the chest. Her sternum collapses and a bulge from his foot pushes out her back. The last, a young Red man with piercings through the bridge of his nose, stabs at Daxo. Daxo catches the blade in his left hand. It sinks into the palm but bends against the reinforced bone as Daxo pushes back till the man’s straightened arm snaps like a twig. Daxo embeds the scepter in the man’s chest and grabs the man’s other hand. He pulls on both arms, lifting the man in the air so that he is eye to eye with Daxo, his feet kicking half a meter from the ground. With a roar, Daxo pulls off both the man’s arms. The body drops to the floor, spitting blood. Daxo rips the scepter out of the man, pulling ribs with it, and beats his own bloody chest with gore-spattered hands. “LIONHEART!!!” He spins the scepter, pointing it at the crowd. “Dogs! Traitors! In the name of your Sovereign, disarm! Disarm!”
The mob behind the massacred men skids to a halt, terrified of the Gold monstrosity. All their lives they’ve known of Gold power, but war is fast and smoky and small through a screen. They always suspected the myth of our violence overwrought. Now they see what our manners have protected them from. The courage in their numbers withers at the terrible sight of this machine of war unlocked from his civil chains. But the mob is a machine as well, and its engine of courage comes from those at the rear. They push forward, screaming and shouting and firing over the heads of those terrified in the front, and the press breaks forward, dozens amongst them falling to be trampled by the weight of the distant brave.
The mob hits more like mud than water. Seeping around Daxo, fighting to run away, heels skidding over bloody stone. My razor carves through the outstretched arm of a young man holding a scorcher, through the face of a fat woman with a rock, the neck of a screaming, terrified teenager with a mouth blue from cloud candy. Bodies push me back and I chop madly, blindly at arms. They seep through.
I fall back to swing again, but I collide with someone behind me and am pushed forward into the bodies of those I’ve maimed, who wail and hold bloody stumps and are trampled by those behind them. I wheel and hack and slash against flailing limbs. A hammer hits my collarbone. Bone holds. Man dies. A knife digs into my cheek and breaks a tooth in half. Spit sprays into my eyes. Blood. Teeth bite my leg and metal digs into my calf. Searing pain. I stomp on someone until I feel something give.
Not ten meters away, Daxo kills and maims in a tyrannical whirlwind like the kind Darrow and only few others still living have ever seen in person, much less produced.
I try to cut my way to him, but I don’t have the mass. Bodies obscure me. Hands pull at me. Shoulders of screaming men subvert my balance as they hit my knees. The back of a head breaks my nose. I headbutt someone else and feel the weaker bone crumple. Sharp metal scrapes down my back ribs and stabs repeatedly into my flank. I howl, pinched between bodies. My legs are caught by someone’s arms and I’m wrestled from the side by a big Red man, his whiskers scrap
ing into my neck. I teeter sideways, pulled down by a mass of bodies. A gun goes off against my thigh. I feel pressure. They pin my sword arm to my side and bite and saw at my hand till the razor slips free.
I crash to the ground under their weight, arms and legs unable to move against their grip as boots stomp on my head and kick my face. Sound goes in and out, my vision stuttering between black and the swarm of feet and legs at the claustrophobic underbelly of the mob. I swallow a tooth and bite the finger off a man.
“Virginia!” I hear beyond the curses and shouts. “Virginia!”
The big Red man atop me twitches. The iron points of a bloody star erupt through his forehead. His eyes roll back into his head and blood sluices onto me as Daxo pulls the Dawn Scepter out of his crushed skull. Another man falls between us. Daxo seizes his belt and hurls him through the air like a doll. I glimpse my friend for a moment, his wild eyes set in that thoughtful face. And despite the horror around us, despite the anger in him, I see the panic of love. He will save me. He will protect me, like he did when he pulled me from the tossing surf as a girl.
And then he is gone, greatness borne down under a human wave that crashes down from all directions.
A boot connects with my temple. My head lolls sideways. Something stabs through my cheek and takes two teeth. Numbly, I feel them tearing at my hair, my clothes, ripping off my boots, cutting my pants with knives and my razor, the blade scraping my skin. Two men rip off my jacket as a woman kicks at my face, and hands paw at my breasts and claw between my thighs. I black out in the darkness, feel hands lifting me up, punching me, jamming into my body.
Then I am free of the mob, the press of bodies above me gone. I open swollen eyes and see through a crack in the darkness. Jeering faces swim beneath me, hands pass me above their heads like a trophy. Sharp objects stick into my buttocks, my thighs.
“Daxo,” I murmur through broken teeth, mouth full of blood and mashed lips. “Daxo…”
I see him again through the crowd. His huge body is splayed out on the ground, held down by a big Obsidian with gold teeth as four others stand over him guarding a muscular Red woman in a Hyperion sanitation uniform. Tall for a Red, she hacks at Daxo’s neck with a hatchet till his head dislodges. She holds it by its spine.
Without looking, she flicks Daxo’s head to the mob. He was a man who could have ruled worlds if he had even the smallest ambition for it, who chose to serve the people even though he despised them. He did that for me. And now his head is tossed around like an inflated toy ball. The golden angels dance no more on Daxo’s crown. They are drowned in his blood.
The woman turns to look at me. Even set in that face, I recognize her eyes through the Red contacts.
A demon from the past, now undead.
Lilath. My brother’s dog of war.
She is alive. She is the Queen of the Syndicate.
How?
Lilath begins to laugh at me.
With a disembodied moan, I tear my eyes away and look up for some escape to the sky. But it is hidden from me behind the painted plaster, where my husband floats golden and glorious, with Sevro at his side, giving his speech to the mob of Phobos, where he heard the heartbeat of humanity and exhorted it to violence, to war, to the taking of lives for liberty.
All that fills my ears is the roar of the human ocean as it sings the song of my husband’s first wife.
HELIOPOLIS STEAMS UNDER the early morning sun. Though northern Helios still buckles under Orion’s storms, the monsoon clouds that drenched Heliopolis with torrential rain have slunk back to the Caliban Sea, leaving the city gleaming white. It might be lovely but for the fact that the rain was irradiated from nuclear warheads, and the air is so thick with humidity steaming in off the Bay of Sirens that the simple act of walking is like wading through pudding.
My wounds are not yet healed. Everything aches. Nausea from anti-rads grips my belly. Sweat trickles down my back as I stand in a thick cluster of my officers to partake in the Fading Dirge. Before us, a sea of Martians sleep upon a bed of lavender. Spread across the tarmac of the spaceport south of Heliopolis, their faces are green and blue, their bodies distended by the sun so that they look like inflated dolls. There is no Triumph, no victory march for the dead. There is only this meager honor.
Scarcely one hundred thousand of the four million lost to the sea, the sand, and the atomics have been gathered for the Fading Dirge. Ten square kilometers of lavender were cut from the southern latifundia by my corps of engineers to mask the smell of the bodies. It was meant to give some semblance of dignity to the departed as we say farewell to them together.