The Dogs of War (SkyLine 3)

“Thanks, Howard,” Wagner smirked. Howard’s response was to spin for the cylindrical tower that loomed high over the city. He started off without another word while the survival suit station sealed itself up. The now party of six kept close and followed the leader across the remainder of the steel bridge.

The diluted stormwinds kicked up coattails behind the group as they made their way to a wall of storefronts. A bar and an outfitter marked the outskirts of the ring-shaped city, which was suspended atop interconnected piers just like Calliope. Howard led the way right through the middle of the buildings without so much as a glance. The Dogs of War followed, through an alleyway shielded from the elements. The wind slapped them in their bare faces with renewed spite when they emerged from the other side.

An arc of steel reached out on either side of them, hooking around to connect behind the massive tower in the center. Warm, yellow hearthlight welcomed Marre’s newest visitors through the windows of several stores, homes and labs. Demi tried, for the sake of his crew, not to think about how badly he wanted to make a beeline for one of them. He kept his head fixed on Howard, no matter how his eyes wandered. Docks reached out from the fringe of Marre’s central ring like greedy fingers pointed at the endless miles of untapped resources just beyond. From these docks, massive crafts called dredgers seemed to float in and out. Really, they rolled on their collection cylinders so far beneath the slush. In the past, this had been the most effective way to gather Chrysum on Neptune. Three months ago, however, the WCC had finished their first Outerworld Chrysum Reactor. It was there the Dogs of War headed now. Howard led the group straight across the ring-shaped pier, for the center of the city. He took the first of many high steps upwards, onto one of eight staircase-bridges that held up the Reactor. He took his time in the climb. He remembered his own first time seeing it, how he almost went overboard himself from leaning too far over the rail to stare. He gave the Dogs of War ample opportunity to gaze as they followed.

“We haven’t discovered another spot remotely like it anywhere in the Milky Way,” Howard told his charges as their heads inevitably floated over the guard-rails of the staircase. “There weren’t even plans for a second settlement on Neptune until some dredgers came across it. A well of Chrysum so deep and dense, we can’t find the bottom. The WCC built the piers around it first as temporary docks for people to come harvest it and bring it back to Calliope. Wasn’t long before it was more convenient to bring the city to the Chrysum.”

“And that…propeller.” Kalus tried to wrap his head around it. He hadn’t noticed the rest of his unit pass him by, or that they were several stairs higher than him now. His eyes swam with the brilliant, light blue swirl in the slushy pit below. “It breaks up th

e ice? Or does it just collect the Chrysum?”

“I’ll show you, but you have to actually make it inside first,” said Howard. His voice was just shockingly far enough away to turn Kalus’ head. He raced a hundred yards up stairs, over the well, to the rest of his unit and their guide. His boots clanked onto a thick steel grate, the disk-shaped base of the towering Reactor. It was notably warmer there, even just within arm’s reach of the place.

Howard lifted a photo-ID on a lanyard from around his neck. He tucked it in a slit in a box hanging from the wall of the building. The box clicked, then beeped, then something like a false panel dimpled itself in on the side of the Reactor. It slid aside. A puff of pressurized air escaped as steam. Howard retrieved his ID and led the group inside. The Dogs’ first instinct was to relax. The soft hum of power through the building and the weight of warm air on their shoulders, like a blanket, was instant therapy. The sideways glances from passing workers and the constant opening of doors down a long, slender, green-lit hallway, however, kept them wary. It was an odd dissonance, much worse than just being plain uncomfortable. Their bodies were relieved - their minds on edge.

“So, how is your uncle? He hasn’t paid me a visit in a long while,” Howard asked so abruptly it made Sophia wince. She wasn’t sure if his genuine smirk made her more or less comfortable. “We communicate now primarily through data he sends me to repurpose in the tech I develop here.”

“Did you know him well?” Sophia asked, as Howard led the group around a blind corner. She was glad she’d answered before. Her breath, along with the collective air between the Dogs and Wagner, was stolen by the sight of the room they stepped into. By the size and fluff of the glossy couches and ornate wooden tables, it was a sort of lounge. One of the fifty-foot-high walls of the huge room, however, consisted completely of a massive assortment of saltwater fish, technicolor corals and anemones.

“I did,” Howard told Sophia, as he continued across the room without turning his head. This was, after all, where he ate lunch most days. It took Sophia a moment to remember what in the world they could possibly have been talking about.

“The-the-then I’d say he’s pretty much the same. Em-em-emotionally neutral. Co-co-confusing.,” she said. She cleared her throat into her fist before continuing. “You should have heard the speech he gave me before I enlisted in this task force. I honestly couldn’t tell if he was encouraging or discouraging it.” Howard let out that little quack of laughter again.

“That does sound like him. You know, I actually admire how ambiguous he manages to be. I can never tell exactly what he’s after, even when he gives me a direct instruction,” Howard said. He stopped at the far side of the aquarium-lounge to punch in the button for an elevator.

“Hey, Howard… What the hell is that?” Kalus asked. A loose finger hung in the general direction of the wall of fish.

“Hm? Oh, that’s an experiment to see if we can terraform contained parts of Neptune to nourish an Earth-like marine ecosystem,” Howard told him, like it was a vending machine. “Arms Master Kalus Delphi,” he added, when he recalled the man’s earlier request. Demi’s palm smacked into his forehead just as the elevator arrived. The group funneled in one by one, after Howard, until the lift was packed.

“Is this the first time you’ve been inside, Wagner?” Lilia whispered in the unwanted, shared body heat as the door slid closed.

“Ye-ye-yeah. This isn’t exactly my side of things… Howard… Do I want to see what you’ve been working on, here?” Wagner murmured.

“You know I couldn’t tell you that, Wagner,” smiled Howard. He pressed in the button for B18 on the floor panel, and the lift began downwards. It soared, soundless, down cables toward the Chrysum well. “I have to tell you all, though, you cannot speak of this. Not to anyone without security clearance at least equal to my own.”

“Wha- what’s your clearance?” Kalus dared to ask as they plunged deeper by the second.

“Eight,” Howard told him. Each of the Dogs of War gulped, along with Wagner. Their clearance rankings were still in letters. One didn’t achieve a numbered clearance until they’d surpassed all twenty-six letters.

They waited out the rest of the ride in silence, until the elevator stopped and opened to a room that flattened their backs against the furthest wall from it. All but Howard, who stepped out into a world seemingly made from churning Chrysum. Even Captain Demi’s jaw popped open as the researcher’s silhouette shrunk into the silver-blue light and slush as it whipped around him. His feet were what gave away his safety. Every one of his steps laid his feet flat; there was glass beneath him. Wagner ventured out first, followed by Demi and the rest of the Dogs. They saw more clearly with each uneasy turn, that they were completely enclosed in glass, or something similarly clear. The elevator had let them out at the very bottom of the Reactor, inside the monumental spinning propeller they’d seen from outside.

“A…A viewing station?” Demi realized, “Why do you need one all the way down here? If you wanted to monitor collection rates, isn’t there an easier way?” Howard answered with his face turned out, to watch the swirling lights on the other side of the glass. Chrysum slush furled around each pass of the propeller blades, and pulsed upwards to the collection vents in the underside of the Reactor.

“It is a viewing station…but not for collection rates,” Howard told the Captain, “It’s for me to monitor behavior.”

“Behavior…of what?” Sophia asked. Howard answered with a glance at his gold-trimmed watch. He confirmed the time, then folded his hands behind his back.

“Watch.”

A single word marked an explosion of motion from above. Enormous black spearheads shot down from above, through the slush layer and deep in the ice beneath the glass antechamber. All eyes followed it down. When the spears had stabbed through too much ice to continue, each of them released a violent tremor. Shards of splintered ice rose up, to be whisked around and further disintegrated by the propellers. The Dogs and Wagner glanced wildly back and forth, from the vibrating spears to the Chrysum-filled ice that floated up. At the very bottoms of them, something black emerged. It was almost like a fluid, though it seemed to ebb and flow with definitive purpose through the ice. It was this formless substance, not the spears, that was truly shattering the solid bed of the Chrysum well. It took some time for one amongst them to realize what it was, and only because he’d seen it once before. It was the same stuff that had come through the cracks in the exploding planet Mukurus.

“Howard… Tell me that’s not…” Wagner sputtered. His knees buckled and he had to grab a glass wall for support.

“What? What is it?” Sophia demanded. She was only so eager because she had a theory already. She’d heard whispers around the Coliseum before the Dogs were deployed.

“It’s the fruit of your uncle’s research on Mars. His Slayer Project… We’re injecting M-Particles into the solid layer of Chrysum under the slush to break it up and dislodge it,” Howard told her.

“The hell are M-Particles?” Kalus asked, face flat against the glass wall.