Morning Star полностью

A hand grabs my foot, jerking me to a halt. I look down and see a warped invisible form grasping my leg. Victra. Carefully, she pulls my weightless body back to the wall so I can clamp my own magnets onto the steel. Spots race across my vision. The city is all around us. It’s dreadful in its silence, in its colors, in its inhuman metal landscape. It feels more like an ancient alien artifact than a place for humans.

“Slow it down.” Victra’s voice crackles in my helmet. “Darrow. You’re hyperventilating. Breathe with me. In. Out. In…” I force my lungs to breathe in sync with her. The spots soon fade. I open my eyes, face inches from the steel.

“You shit your suit or something?” Sevro asks.

“I’m good,” I say. “A little rusty.”

“Ugh. Pun intended, I’m sure.” Ragnar and the rest of the Howlers land thirty meters beneath us on the wall. Pebble waves up to me. “Got three hundred meters to go. Let’s climb, you pixies.”

Lights glow behind the glass of Quicksilver’s double-helix towers. Connecting the double helixes are nearly two hundred levels of offices. I can make out shapes moving inside at computer terminals. I zoom in with my optics to watch the stock traders sitting in their offices, their assistants moving to and fro, analysts signaling furiously on holographic trading boards that communicate with the markets on Luna. Silvers, all. They remind me of industrious bees.

“Makes me miss the boys,” Victra says. Takes me a moment to realize she’s not talking about the Silvers. The last time she and I tried this tactic, Tactus and Roque were with us. We infiltrated Karnus’s flagship from vacuum as he refueled at an asteroid base during the Academy’s mock war. We cut through his hull with aims of kidnapping him to eliminate his team. But it was a trap and I narrowly escaped with the help of my friends, a broken arm my only reward for the gambit.

It takes us five minutes to climb from our landing place to the peak of the tower, where it becomes a large crescent. We don’t go hand over hand, so climbing isn’t the true term. The magnets in our gloves have fluctuating positive and negative currents that allow us to roll up the side of the tower like we have wheels in our palms. The toughest part of the ascent, or descent, or whatever you’d call it in the null grav, is the crescent slope at the extreme height or end of the tower. We have to cling to a narrow metal support beam that extends out among a ceiling of glass, much like the stem of a leaf. Beneath our bellies and through the glass lies Quicksilver’s famous museum. And above us, just over the peak of Quicksilver’s tower, hangs Mars.

My planet seems larger than space. Larger than anything ever could be. A world of billions of souls, of designer oceans, mountains, and more irrigable acres of dry land than Earth ever had. It’s night on this side of the world. And you could never know that millions of kilometers of tunnels wind through the bones of the planet, that even as its surface glows with the lights of the Thousand Cities of Mars, there is a pulse unseen, a tide that is rising. But now it looks peaceful. War a distant, impossible thing. I wonder what a poet would say in this moment. What Roque would whisper into the air. Something about the calm before the storm. Or a heartbeat among the deep. But then there’s a flash. It startles me. A spasm of light that flares white, then erodes into devilish neon as a mushroom grows in the planet’s blackness.

“Do you see that?” I ask over the coms, blinking away the cigar burn the distant detonation made in my vision. Our coms crackle with curses as the others turn to see.

“Shit,” Sevro murmurs. “New Thebes?”

“No,” Pebble answers. “Farther north. That’s the Aventine Peninsula. So it’s probably Cyprion. Last intel said the Red Legion was moving toward the city.”

Then comes another flash. And the seven of us hunker motionless on the crest of the building, watching as a second nuclear bomb detonates a thumb’s distance away from the first.

“Bloodydamn. Is it us or them?” I ask. “Sevro!”

“I don’t know,” Sevro says impatiently.

“You don’t know?” Victra asks.

How could he not know? I want to shout. But I grasp the answer, because Dancer’s words now haunt me. “Sevro’s not running this war,” he told me, weeks ago after another failed Howler mission. “He’s just a man pouring gas on the fire.” Maybe I didn’t understand how far gone this war is, how far reaching the chaos has become.