“Why, Julii Industries, of course.”
—
I watch the metal jungle pass outside the dirty duroglass window as the tram pulls away from the station. Victra sits down next to me, a troubled look on her face. But I’m a world away from her, my friends. Lost in memory. I’ve been to the Hive before with ArchGovernor Augustus and Mustang. He brought the lancers to meet with Society economic ministers to discuss modernizing the moon’s infrastructure. After the meetings she and I snuck away to the moon’s famous aquarium. I’d rented it out at absurd cost and arranged a meal and wine to be served to us in front of the orca tank. Mustang always liked natural creatures more than Carved ones.
I’ve traded fifty-year-old wines and Pink valets for a grimmer world with rusting bones and rebel thugs. This is the real world. Not the dream the Golds live in. Today I feel the silent screams of a civilization that has been stepped on for hundreds of years.
Our path skirts around the edges of the Hollows, the center of the moon where the latticework of cage slum apartments festers without gravity. To go there would be to risk falling into the middle of the Syndicate street war against the Sons of Ares. And to go any higher into the midColor levels would be to risk Society marines and their security infrastructure of cameras and holoScanners.
Instead, we pass through the hinterlands of maintenance levels between the Hollows and the Needles, where Reds and Oranges keep the moon running. Our tram, driven by a Sons sympathizer, speeds through its stops. The faces of waiting workers blur together as we pass. A pastiche of eyes. But faces all gray. Not the color of metal, but the color of old ash in a campfire. Ash faces. Ash clothes. Ash lives.
But as the tunnel swallows our tram, color erupts around us. Graffiti and years of rage bleeding out from the ribbed and cracking walls of its once gray throat. Profanity in fifteen dialects. Golds ripped open in a dozen dark ways. And to the right of a crude sketch of a reaper’s scythe decapitating Octavia au Lune is an image of Eo hanging from the gallows in digital paint, hair aflame, “Break the Chains
Half an hour after we set out, our tram grinds to a halt outside a deserted lowColor industrial hub where thousands of workers should diverge from their early-morning commute from the Stacks to attend their functions. But now it’s still as a cemetery. Trash litters the metal floors. HoloCans still flash with the Society’s news programs. A cup sits on a table in a café, steam still rising off the top of the beverage. The Sons have cleared the way only a few minutes before. Shows the extent of their influence here.
When we leave, life will return to the place. But after we plant the bombs we’ve brought with us? After we destroy the manufacturing, won’t all the men and women we intend to help be just as unemployed as those poor creatures in the tram station? If work is their reason for being, what happens when we take it away? I’d voice my concerns to Sevro, but he’s a driven arrow. As dogmatic as I once was. And to question him aloud seems a betrayal of our friendship. He’s always trusted me blindly. So am I the worse friend for having doubts in him?
We pass through several gravLifts into a garage for garbage disposal haulers, also owned by Julii Industries. I catch Victra wiping dirt off the family crest on one of the doors. The speared sun is worn and faded. The few dozen Red and Orange workers of the facility pretend not to notice our group as we file into one of the hauler bays. Inside, at the base of two huge haulers, we find a small army of Sons of Ares. More than six hundred.
They’re not soldiers. Not like us. Most are men, but there’s a scattering of women, mostly younger Reds and Oranges forced to migrate here for work to feed Mars-side families. Their weapons are shoddy. Some stand. Other are seated, turning from conversations to see our pack of Obsidian killers stalking across the metal deck, carrying bags of gear and pushing two mysterious carts. A small sadness grows in me. Whatever they do, wherever they go, their lives will be stained by this day. If it were my duty to address them, I’d warn them the burden they’re taking on, the evil they’ll be letting into their lives. I’d say it’s nicer to hear about glorious victories in war than to witness them. Than to feel the weird unreality of lying in bed every morning knowing you’ve killed a man, knowing a friend is gone.
