The Red leans against the med room’s gray wall next to a glossy paper cutout of a Pink model on one of Venus’s white-sand beaches. “It’s just cargo haulers down here,” he says, silently noting how our Obsidian guises have been discarded. If it startles him how many of us are Gold, he doesn’t let on. Probably knew from the start. His eyes linger on me the longest. “But they’re all grounded. They got luxury liners and private yachts in the Needles, but you go up there, you folks are caught in a minute. Two, tops. There’s facial-recognition cameras at every tram door. Retina scanners in the advertisement holos. And even if you got onto one of their ships, you gotta get past the naval pickets. Ain’t like you can just teleport to safety.”
“That’d be convenient,” Clown mutters.
“We jack a shuttle and run the pickets,” Sevro says. “Done it before.”
“They’ll shoot us down,” I say tensely. It’s pissing me off that he keeps ignoring my attempts to get him to the door.
“Didn’t last time.”
“Last time we had Lysander,” I remind him.
“And now we got Quicksilver.”
“The Jackal will sacrifice Quicksilver to kill us,” I say. “Count on it.”
“Not if we go straight vertical burn to the surface,” Sevro says. “Sons have hidden tunnel entrances. We will fall from orbit and go straight underground.”
“I will not do that,” Ragnar says. “It is foolhardy. And it abandons these noble men and women to slaughter.”
“I agree with Rags,” Holiday says. She scoots away from Clown and continues looking at her datapad, monitoring police frequencies.
“Say you get off. What happens to us?” Rollo asks. “The Jackal finds out the Reaper and Ares were here and he’ll tear this station apart piecemeal. Any Son left behind will be dead in a week. Did you think of that?” He makes a disgusted look. “I know who you are. We knew the second Ragnar walked into the hangar. But I didn’t think Howlers ran. And I didn’t think the Reaper took orders.”
Sevro takes a step toward him. “You got another option, shitface? Or you just gonna run your mouth?”
“Yeah, I got one,” Rollo says. “Stay. Help us take the station.”
The Howlers laugh. “Take the station? With what army?” Clown asks.
“His,” Rollo says, turning to me. “I don’t rightly know how you’re alive, Reaper. But…I was eating noodles by myself at midnight when the Sons leaked your Carving video onto the holoNet. Society cyber police shut down the site in two minutes. But once it was out…could find it on a million sites before I finished my bowl. They couldn’t contain that. And then the Phobos servers crashed. You know why?”
“Securitas’s cyber division pulled the plug,” Victra says. “It’s standard protocol.”
He shakes his head. “Servers crashed because thirty million people were trying to access the holoNet at the same time in the middle of the night. Servers couldn’t handle the traffic. Golds pulled the plug after that. So what I’m sayin’ is if you march down to the Hive and tell the lowColors there you’re alive, we can take this moon.”
“Easy as that?” Victra asks skeptically.
“That’s right. There’s round about twenty-five million lowColors here crawling over one another, fighting for square meters, protein packages, Syndicate smack, whatever. Reaper shows his mug, all that goes to vapor. All that fighting. All that scrappin’. They
He sends chills down my spine. But Victra’s skeptical, and Sevro’s quiet. Hurt.
“Do you know what a squad of Society Legionnaires can do to a mob of rabble?” Victra asks. “The weapons you’ve seen are geared to taking out men in armor. PulseFists. Razors. When they use coilguns or rattlers on mobs, a single man can fire a thousand rounds a minute. It sounds like paper tearing. Human body doesn’t even know that sound is supposed to be frightening. They can superheat the water in your cellular structure with microwaves. And those are just Gray anti-mob squads. What if they unleash the Obsidian? What if Golds themselves come in their armor? What if they shut off your air? Your water?”
“What if we shut off theirs?” Rollo asks.
I frown. “Can you do that?”
“Give me a reason to.” He looks at Victra, and by the bite in his voice, I know he knows exactly what her last name is. “They might be soldiers,
