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But why in Jove’s name would Sefi attack Victra?

She wouldn’t.

It had to be Volsung Fá. He’s got Sefi’s number, setting up a war. Volga was likely one of those bodies dropped over Agea. The thought almost sends me into a downward spiral. But I can’t let it distract me. Without Volga, Sefi has no leash on me. She’ll freeze my movement. She’ll trap me in the sinking ship. Worse. She’ll trap the kids. And from what I’ve seen of Volsung Fá, he has a plan, and its escalation. With the tensions between the Republic as they are, this will be war if they buy that the Alltribe was in on this.

That means the kids become real hostages.

So I gotta get them out, and my window for exit is quickly closing.

That kid better be wearing his harness under his clothing. I didn’t get him that garage just to tinker with gravBikes.

I take care to choose spider-paralytic from the designer rounds and fit a magazine into my pistol, then throw on my jacket, loop a pack of explosives under my arm, and run to the Snowball to attach the hook Pax made in the garage to the back of the landing ramp. Oh, this will be nasty. I pick my gear back up.

“Grarnir?” a man says from behind. I turn. Gudkind, Freihild’s replacement as vynKjr of the skuggi, stands in the doorway of the hangar. Two of my cleverer skuggi flank him. “Grarnir!” he calls without aggression. “The Queen commands your presence. You’re to join her in the western bunker.”

There it is. Sefi’s soldiers won’t mean me harm, but she’ll never let me go out of her sight with the kids again. I have to act now, while I still have access to my ship.

When Gudkind sees my scarabSkin, the neodymium carry case, and the bag of explosives, his hand drifts toward his poison-edged throwing knives. The other two skuggi frown and turn the safeties off their pulseRifles. They’re confused. They just wanted to bring me to their queen.

“Sorry lads. It’s not personal.”

I get the drop on them, but damn they’re fast.

In one fluid motion, I grab my pistol in its holster, fall flat on my back to minimize my exposure, and push my toes down on the pressure pads. The skipBoots release an impulse that shoves me into a ten-meter backward slide. I fire three times through the holster. Gudkind’s knives skim centimeters above my nose. Their pulseRifle rounds pound into the hangar walls behind me. I stand up. All three skuggi are rigid as boards from the paralytic slugs embedded in their foreheads. And then they teeter over, drooling foam.

I strip their coms and as I bound on the skipBoots like a grasshopper, I apologize. “I know you’re just following your Queen’s orders. But this boat’s going down.”

As I plant the explosives on the southern landing pad, I watch Mars go mad. The Republic news channels froth with anger and racial vitriol at the attack on the Pandora. They claim it was Sefi’s version of poetic irony. The rain on Mercury claimed one million Obsidians. Here is Sefi’s rain, on the home of Lionheart and the Reaper, on the capital of the Rising. The revenge of the coldbloods. The inevitable pestilence of their nature.

The world outside churns by the time I make it to an overlook of the training ludus. The children are not at their lessons. I don’t have access to their safety protocols for obvious reasons, but if Sefi is in the west bunker, they will be headed there too. Going aerial is dangerous with soft targets, so they would have taken the tunnels that emerge in the western statue park just near the bunker. I can beat them there if I fly.

Oh Hades, I’m going to die.

My mind races as I bound up marble steps and across snowy courtyards. It wasn’t the Alltribe in those ships. It had to have been Ascomanni. They’re trying to start a war. Volga was in a cell. If they boarded, there is almost no chance she escaped. I see her falling in that rain over Agea. Her bones turning to splinters on the concrete roads.

This is the worst time for the insurance plan. I thought I’d have more warning when things started going south. Maybe I should have left the second Fá showed up, or when Valdir went berserk. I waited too long. There will be too many of them. I holster my guns and clutch the neodymium box tighter. Against a pack of armored Obsidian, a pistol won’t do much.

The exponential escalation has begun between the Republic and Alltribe.

Seems the Republic is eager to blame the Obsidians for the attack.

I hear it in the ripWing engines lifting off from high-mountain hangars. In the thunder of metal boots. In the drums beating in the army camps west of the city. I see it in the throngs of mid- and lowColors the Obsidians herd away from sensitive areas. And in the metal glinting in the sky as orbital fleets prepare for a Republic response. Dammit, Sefi. Don’t strike first at them. This is what Fá wants.

Volsung Fá isn’t a barbarian like I initially thought. If he organized the attack on the Pandora, he’s trained in regime destabilization. It’s textbook.

Sooner or later, some nervous finger will twitch.

Or Fá will play another card.

Then the dominoes fall. And the nukes go off.

This is how a world ends.

I won’t sit here and wait for it.

I’m too late to set up the neodymium magnet. I spot the children in the center of a cluster of Valkyrie making their way across a statue park toward the western bunker. The female warriors each wear sixty kilograms of pulseArmor, gravBoots, and full complements of weapons. Their helmets are up. Shit, there goes any chance at sonics. In battle, they could take a whole century of Gray legionnaires. But this isn’t a battle, and the last thing I want is to kill them.

My legs burn as I close the distance to the Valkyrie. I shift to ghostCloak, and activate the bombs on the southern landing pad. They’re just big enough to break windows and make huge mushrooms of smoke. Sirens wail. The tactical response teams on deck in the heights of Griffinhold deploy like meteors toward the pad and away from me.