She stepped into the dark and knew she was not alone.
There was a different quality to a room when there was someone else in it. She did not know how or why. Perhaps it was something unconscious, the brain putting together the clues of faint sounds and faint smells to conclude something despite an apparent lack of evidence. Perhaps it was a sixth sense that all humans had, the same irrational and undocumented sense for presence that recognized when someone was near, when someone was absent; the same sense that made people believe in ghosts.
Whatever the cause, it was irrelevant, and Constance had no interest in the why, only the effect: there was someone else in the room with her.
She stayed with her back to the wall, knowing that she was partly defended there. If she stepped inside, she would be silhouetted by the light and whoever was in the room would have a clear shot at her. The light switch was around the corner, but Constance did not dare reach for it.
Outside, the red crescent of Mars appeared. In a few moments more, the turn of the spaceship would take Constance’s windows past the brilliance of the sun.
There was no sound from below, where Arawn had gone. If she shouted for him, she would warn whoever was hidden in her room and provoke an attack. Constance shifted her grip on her gun and waited for the sun.
Mars vanished again beyond the edge of her windows. The sun would appear soon; already the stars were being dimmed by the edges of its corona. Constance waited.
The room was lightening. Soon—
The communications equipment from the conference room suddenly came to life, unspeakably, unexpectedly loud. “Huntress! Huntress, please respond—”
The sun had risen, too bright to look at directly and filling Constance’s room with brilliance. She burst in and found that the intruder had risen as well, ready to fire.
He was fast as he fired at her but missed; she had come in lower than he’d expected, instinctively ducking down toward the floor. She fired but only winged him; he dropped his gun and fell down behind her bed.
“Huntress!” The comm was still shouting for her. “Huntress, urgent transmission; please respond—”
“Constance!” Arawn shouted, and she heard his steps below but did not let any of it distract her, advancing deeper into the room toward where the assassin had fallen.
She saw the movement an instant before the man fired, realizing almost too late that there had been two assassins. The bullet struck her in the side and went through. She could not tell how serious it was; her whole side burned. She grabbed for her gun, but the man who had come from behind the door was aiming for her head—
Arawn’s bullet struck his head a glancing blow. Constance had the displeasure of watching his face shatter and explode. He was not dead, but he dropped to his knees without eyes or nose or skin on his cheek. A second bullet from Arawn toppled him for good. Constance found that she could not remember what he had looked like before the first blow had taken his face.
There was still the second man. Ignoring the blood that was soaking her shirt, Constance rolled for her gun and got it just as the second man came back up to fire at Arawn.
Her bullet caught him in the chest, and he fell. Constance leaned against the bed, breathing hard, and reached one hand slowly down to feel her side. The comm system was still shouting, “Huntress! Huntress!”
Two men; of course there had been two men. Everyone sensible had a partner, someone to back him when things went badly. She should have known.
Arawn’s hands grabbed hers before she could touch her side. “Let me see,” he demanded, and pushed her so that she was sitting flat against the side of the bed while he pulled her damp shirt away from her side. Constance said, “Assassins.”
“System,” Arawn agreed grimly. One hand spread itself over her stomach to hold her still. She lifted her arm and gripped his shoulder so that he could get to her side unimpeded, and he bent so close to her that his black hair brushed against her chest. She gripped the back of his shirt tighter, twisting the fabric in her hand.
Still the comm system called for her.
“There could be more,” Constance said, and gritted her teeth as Arawn’s fingers pressed at the wound.
“There probably are,” Arawn said. “This needs to be stitched.”
“Is it bad?”
“It’s just a crease,” he said. “But it needs stitches. I—”
Someone was pounding on the door. Arawn was up in an instant and in front of Constance, his gun up.
“Answer it,” Constance said.
“It could be—”
“We are on my ship, surrounded by my people, and they’ve been calling my name for the past five minutes. It’s someone come looking for me. Answer it and answer the comm system, too.”
He obeyed. Constance pressed one hand to her side to slow the blood flow and pulled her gun closer with her other hand. It was just possible there was a third person hidden somewhere in the room—
She heard the door open below, and Arawn snapped, “The Huntress has just been attacked. Send guards to her and send out people to find any more System assassins. Doctor Ivanov needs protection. What do you want?”
“Mars,” said the messenger. Constance knew his voice, though it was hollow with horror now. She was not sure whether he had understood anything Arawn had said to him. “There was a bomb detonated on Martian soil.”
There was no one else in the bedroom, Constance decided, or they would have killed her already. She pushed herself slowly to her feet, her side burning, trickles of heat sliding down and soaking into her waistband.
“The System detonated it?” Arawn asked as Constance limped to the stairs and started to hobble her way down.
The messenger was pale with horror, she saw, when she reached the bottom of the steps. He grew paler when he saw her covered in blood.
“It was a Terran Class 1,” he said to her, not to Arawn, while the communications system still cried, “Huntress, Huntress!” “Huntress, they detonated a Terran Class 1 bomb on Mars.”
—
It should not have happened. The System had threatened her people, not the Martians. Constance could scarcely believe the System had even kept any Terran Class 1s on Mars; those bombs were for the small and unruly moons in the outer solar system, the planetary bodies that could be destroyed completely by them. Seven of those bombs on Earth had not rendered the planet uninhabitable—it had taken the simultaneous meltdown of the planet’s nuclear power plants to do that—and one bomb on Mars did not kill off the entire population, but the destruction was enough.
A third of the System’s military consisted of Martians. It should not have happened.
“We attack the System fleet directly,” Constance said the moment the last stitch had been tied off in her side.
“Our numbers—” Milla began.
“And if we don’t attack immediately?” Constance demanded.
Milla blinked once but did not look away from Constance. She admitted, “They may detonate another bomb.”
“Exactly.” Constance pushed herself off the operating table. She had never liked hospitals or medical bays: too full of cameras, too full of untrustworthy machines. The Wild Hunt’s medical bay was no exception. White walls and ceiling and floor and the steel-gleaming appliances that filled it; in the corner of the room was the System medical chamber. Those chambers were a marvel of technology, certainly; Constance had watched one fix Mattie’s broken arm in a matter of minutes. Years before that, she’d seen a woman shredded by shrapnel put into a medical chamber. The robotic arms had plunged into the pulpy red of her stomach and taken out the tearing metal, had threaded wires and machines into her chest to keep her heart beating, and then had sealed over the whole mess with a layer of new skin. The woman had been conscious the whole time, wide-eyed and gasping. It was a magnificent machine, and it had the ability to save the most badly wounded soldiers.
But the medical chambers could be deadly when they malfunctioned, for a machine had
no sense of judgment and did not know when to stop. Constance had heard about what happened when one was used incorrectly: limbs rent from torsos, arteries torn by shredding blades, nerves peeled from the skin like wires being stripped of their insulation. Rumors had abounded on Miranda that the System would use the medical chambers incorrectly on purpose to take a rebellious citizen screaming apart and put her back together again afterward, stitched up and wrong.
“We didn’t even know they had a bomb stored on Mars,” Constance said, pulling her shirt back over her head. Arawn, standing just beyond Milla, watched the hem of her shirt as she tugged it down. “We don’t know how many more are on the surface.” She pulled her hair out of its band and smoothed it back with her fingers, brushing sweat away from her temples. “The first thing Christoph or Anji did when they took a moon was to take control of the bombs stored on its surface to make sure the System couldn’t detonate them. If the System has bombs that we don’t know about—”
Arawn swore. Milla’s expression grew more pinched.
“Have someone send a message to Christoph and Julian,” Constance told them. “We attack the System fleet immediately.”
Arawn set off, but Milla’s cold fingers gripped Constance’s arm when she tried to walk past.
“This could be a suicide mission,” Milla warned her in a voice low enough that none of the medical personnel could overhear her.
Constance said, “We don’t have any other choice.”
The fleet was on the other side of the planet. It meant that they were out of range for Constance’s ships to detect and to learn how they were positioned, but it also meant that the fleet could not see them. “Keep close to the atmosphere,” she ordered when she reached the piloting room of the Wild Hunt, and there was a moment of lightness as the ship dipped down, closer to the tenuous edge of Mars’s atmosphere. Half of her fleet, Constance saw, followed. The other half headed off in the opposite direction.
Good.
“Slowly,” Constance cautioned. She didn’t want the burning of the atmosphere to alert the System before she was ready.
The fleet moved fast, spreading out through the atmosphere as Constance’s people had spread out over the desert stone. If Constance looked down at the planet, she could see the spreading black smoke from the explosion. When she looked at that smoke, there was nothing in her heart: no fear, no doubt, no dread. Nothing—except anger.
They were almost in range of System detection.
The piloting room on the Wild Hunt was enormous, but Constance, used to the little piloting room on the Annwn, stood close behind her pilot’s back, almost as if she were a part of the ship. She said, “Get down now.”
Spaceships, that is, ships built for interplanetary travel, were designed for simulation of gravity, using wheels and disks that spun to create centripetal force, not for flight through atmosphere. Such ships could land on a planet or fly through its atmosphere, but it was inefficient and risky and for the most part simply was not done. Battles in a planet’s atmosphere were carried out by ground-based aircraft and shuttles from the spaceships, not by the spaceships themselves. The System would expect to see Constance’s space fleet coming at them from orbit. They would not think to look down to the planet’s surface.
Constance and half of her fleet dropped down into Mars’s atmosphere, the air igniting around the spinning ships as they hurtled through, sonic booms rushing out over the landscape.
The rest of Constance’s fleet came around from orbit, and the System fleet—predictably—whirled to attack what they thought was Constance’s full force.
The Wild Hunt rattled with turbulence. Constance gave in to the unsteadiness beneath her feet and grabbed on to the pilot’s chair to brace herself as he steered them through.
There was smoke in the sky, nuclear clouds. That and the heated air from the ship’s passage blurred the view on the screen, almost blocking out the stars and the brighter lights of starships fighting.
Closer, closer. Constance had to get her spaceships back up into orbit, but not yet, not yet; they weren’t in position yet. “Keep course,” she warned the pilot, and the Wild Hunt stayed low, flames licking off its skin.
Closer. The System had stationed itself above Olympus Mons, and the gentle slope of the vast mountain was reaching up toward the Wild Hunt’s trajectory. Soon Constance would have no choice but to fly upward or strike the stone.
The System fleet was above.
“Now,” said Constance, and her ships pulled up, soaring toward the cold freedom of space.
The System fleet realized swiftly that it had been distracted. Its warships were turning away from the feinting part of Constance’s fleet and heading for the ships led by the Wild Hunt. Constance found the edge of the atmosphere in sudden lightness after the abrupt cessation of the ship’s rattling. A System ship, spinning on its central axis, was streaking through the sky toward them, its gun ports aglow, ready to fire. Constance said, “That one—fire.”
The Wild Hunt was ready. A burst of brilliant light and the skin of the approaching System ship cracked and split, the ship blown into a spin by the force of the bomb, its weapons shooting wide. The Wild Hunt advanced with its hounds behind it.
Her people were strong, and they were swift, and they were full of anger. Every shot that Constance fired felt righteous, and the collapse of the System ships that were struck felt like revenge properly taken.
But they were outnumbered—
One of her ships lost its navigation and started a free fall toward the planet’s surface. Another went dead, its wheel riddled with holes, and floated away from the battle. Mars’s gravity would pull that one down, too, in time.
The Wild Hunt dodged a shot from one of the System’s ships, but another caught it in the side. Constance gripped the back of the pilot’s chair grimly. She could sit in the captain’s chair, but then she would be far from the pilot and the weaponry systems, and there was so much restless energy in her that she only wanted to stand.
The weapons fire from the System forces was too thick to dodge. “Tell everyone to spread out,” Constance ordered even though she knew that that would make them vulnerable to being picked off one by one. At least they would not go out like Connor Ivanov, all trapped together, cornered in one narrow and unmaneuverable position.
There they were, the other three hundred ships, Arawn and Milla roaring forward like a pack of wolves. Constance saw her ships advancing in two dense clouds, a pincer on the System’s fleet, in a tight and unified pattern.
The other half of her fleet was soaring toward her, trying to pin the System fleet between two attacking lines and destroy it. It would do no good. Constance had managed to take out a chunk of the enemy fleet before they’d gathered themselves, but even so, there were too many System ships and too few with her.
She shouldn’t have faced the System outright, she thought. Her people were guerrillas, not soldiers. The System knew how to fight in clean and orderly lines, and her people did not. But what else could she have done?
Another System ship lost control and fell out of the battle. At least there was that, Constance told herself; at least they were taking the System with them. If they could destroy one System ship for every one of their own, they would cut the System fleet around Mars in half. At least there was that—
The Wild Hunt rocked with another blow. The lights dimmed, then came back on with shivering brightness, as if the source of the light had been struck and was clinging to survival only by a slender thread.
Mars would be free, at least, and Earth would be gone.
“Huntress, we’re almost out of ammunition,” said the pilot.
“Then load it all,” Constance told him, “and get ready to fire.”
A System warship was coming toward her. Its surface was pocked with black scorch marks, but it showed no sign of weakness despite its scars. Its gun ports were live and ready to fire. Strangely, selfishly, Constance thought of Mattie. What would he think when he heard
that she, too, had died?
The System warship fired, struck the Wild Hunt squarely, and threw Constance into a darkness illuminated only by the glow of instrumentation. She did not allow herself or her people any time to be stunned by the blow. Another hit like that and they would join the rest of the ships on a fatal fall to Mars.
“Fire all our remaining ammunition at that ship,” Constance ordered, and her people obeyed without hesitation, as if their hands were extensions of her hands, their wills extensions of her will. The Wild Hunt fired, and the System warship reeled on its axis, torque added to its spin by the force of the blow.
While the System ship was struggling to right itself, Constance said, “Set a course for that ship. When I tell you to, I want you to go to maximum speed, aiming for that ship.”
The System warship was righting its wild yaw. The Wild Hunt shifted its position, aiming for the ship, engines gathering power. Just as she had when facing the soldiers in the armory near Isabellon, Constance felt very calm. This was right. This was natural. This was always how she had expected it to end. There was no more fear here.
“Ram them,” Constance said, and the Wild Hunt jumped forward, but the System warship was already rocketing away.
For a moment Constance wondered how they’d reacted so fast, how they’d known she was going to attack them the way she was. An old paranoia struck her. The cameras? Had the System known? Had the System heard?
No, she realized as her attention widened to include the rest of the battlefield; it was not only the System warship she’d been about to ram that was leaving the battlefield. Ships all over were pulling away, lifting off, rocketing away from Mars.
Only half of the System ships were flying away. Constance was tense, trying to understand. Was it a trap? Were they pulling away only so that they could attack again as one?
No, she realized as the ships hurtled away at top speed. They were leaving.
The remaining System forces were still fighting, but not for long. As Constance watched, they peeled away as well, in a slightly different direction than the first group had gone, and with their parting there was no fleet left over the clouded atmosphere of Mars except her own.
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