He stares at the Annihilo. “My father once said anyone interesting is at war with themselves, and can thus be described in just two words. What are Atalantia’s?”
“Velvet buzzsaw.” He says nothing in reply. “Atalantia has a savage brain and immensely contagious charisma. She is hindered by neither guilt nor doubt. She knows no half measures. She is a social strategist, a herpetologist, a sculptor, a laughing, masterful woman in love with the sound of her own voice, and convinced that beauty is the pinnacle of existence—in any form.” I do not speak of her vices. It would be improper for him to ask, so he does not.
He lets the silence stretch and then looks over at me. “Do you know what I learned from my father’s death?”
I wait for him to tell me.
“Not to ramble.”
Exposed to the harsh elements of Io, Romulus wasted precious air on his last proclamations, and fell short of reaching the tomb of his ancestor, Akari.
I swallow my reply.
Lost in thought, Diomedes looks back at Atalantia’s ship. After a time of consideration, he speaks. “You are the legal heir of House Lune, and stand to inherit whatever remains of its possessions.” He means ships, legions, oaths that have no doubt passed to House Grimmus. Any inheritance I am due will cost Atalantia dearly. “Will she see you as ally or rival?”
I do not know.
I embarked upon this course believing I could reason with my godfather. He was always rational, but now he is dead. Atalantia as Dictator is far more unpredictable.
Ten years changed me. Did it change her?
Though Atalantia detested children on general principle, she made an exception for her nephew, Ajax, and for me, the son of her best friend and heir of her mentor. I was Atalantia’s favorite because, unlike Ajax, I won the affection of the only midColor Atalantia has ever respected—Glirastes of Heliopolis. A hybrid architect-physicist, Glirastes was the greatest Master Maker in centuries, and the tastemaker of an age. And because Grandmother chose me to be the sole inheritor of the Mind’s Eye, the secrets to which Atalantia always coveted.
Despite that affection, nothing from my childhood with Atalantia—not our nights at the Hyperion Opera, not our hand-in-hand critiques of Violet exhibitions, nor even our mutual affection for equestrian husbandry—could disabuse me of the suspicion that I was little more than a doll for her to dress up and parade around.
I’m ashamed to admit I let her. With my parents dead and Aja often away, I found myself willing to go to great lengths for a kind word.
And Atalantia gave so many, Grandmother so few.
Yet one of Octavia’s axioms haunts me: “Fear those who seek your company for their own vanity. As soon as you eclipse them in the mirror, it won’t be the mirror they break.”
I have no designs for rule. But convincing Atalantia of that is another matter entirely.
“I cannot say how she will react,” I reply at last. “But so long as there is no scar on my face, I cannot inherit anything.” I chew the inside of my cheek. “Are you frightened?”
“To meet Atalantia? Conditionally.” He pauses. “To see my uncle again? Certainly.”
I am a little worried to meet the Fear Knight as well.
OWING TO ITS TRAUMATIC REBIRTH, Mercury is a temperamental planet of moods and stark climate zones. Deeming it easier to change a planet than human nature, Gold worldmakers employed mass-drivers on Mercury to alter her rotational period to match Earth’s. Such heavy-handed terraforming is sometimes necessary, but it leaves visible seams.
At the seam where the Sycorax Sea meets the polar ice, steam seeps from the wide mouth Harnassus’s blacksmiths cut into the façade of a glacier. Landing lights invite us into the glacier where a makeshift industrial world bustles around an excavation site. As we land, the sprawling barracks and engineering garages and mess halls on the floor look like toy blocks compared to the mass of metal being dug out of the ice. The ancient engine looks like an upside-down turtle shell pierced with a trident.
Imperator Cadus Harnassus, the Terran hero of Old Tokyo, meets me on the sand-strewn tarmac. He is a geode of a man. Slump-shouldered, slow-walking, with umber skin and a bulbous drinker’s nose set in a face that looks increasingly like an angry puppy’s the deeper he plunges into his fifties—all of which belies the intricate intelligence of a starShell engineer who became the hero of his caste.
For eight years, he’s kept his cherished Terran Second Legion Blacksmiths intact. In this war Gold may hold a monopoly on supersoldiers and military doctrine, but we have one on creativity. Wary as I am to admit it, much of that is thanks to Harnassus.
I’ve had brilliant commanders, stupid commanders, and bloody commanders, but finding a steady commander is as rare as an honest man in a Silver guildhouse. If only this steady commander didn’t have ambitions of one day sitting in my wife’s chair.
Formally speaking, he is the ArchImperator of this army, and I am an outlaw.
It was Harnassus whom the Senate formerly anointed my successor when I went rogue. Orion, they knew, was far too loyal to me. And it was Harnassus who, either for political gain or out of pedantic obedience to the law, overruled Orion and sent nearly half the fleet back to Luna, setting the stage for Atalantia’s attack on the remnant. Gone are the days when he could sit at any table and chew the fat with the infantry. The men, like Orion, blame him for this.
But in the end it wasn’t Harnassus who chose to invade Mercury. That’s on me.
“Look at that. The Myth and his puppy.” Harnassus’s Orange eyes dance over Rhonna and me as if he knows a private joke. “Have you come to join me in my northern banishment?”
“You’re behind schedule, Imperator,” I say with a salute.
He returns a half-hearted one and spits out a stream of tobacco juice. It freezes in his tangled beard.
“Then the schedule’s wrong.” He scratches his head and pulls out a hair. Not that he can spare many. “My lads are worked to the bone for this damn insanity you and the airhead cooked up.”
I jerk my head to the engineers that disembark from the steaming shuttles. “That’s why I brought more. The Seventeenth is all yours. Their storm engine in the Waste is primed and ready. Orion has had four of hers in the Sycorax burning two klicks deep for a week.”
He frowns. “There’s five others? You might have told me.”
“There are six others. Operational security is paramount.”
“Fancy way of saying you don’t trust me.”
“I trusted you with this one, didn’t I?”
“So much you came yourself. Seven all told then.” His mind goes to work. “How hot’s that witch’s cauldron? Forty, forty-one?”