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“You beautiful bastard. Rhonna found us. The Star paved our way. You beautiful genius. You sick, twisted god.”

A quaking of fear enters my chest, and then warps into fury as I think of how they nuked my men, cut their throats, pushed my face in the dirt. Feed me my cock, will they?

I push Thraxa off. “I need boots. StarShell. Ammo.”

“And this, sir,” a voice says. Rhonna skims toward us with my slingBlade. Her mech is gone. “Found it in the sand.” I catch it in the air. Thraxa pats her hammer with a smile.

“Shall we?”

* * *

—

The battle tips with the coming of the Morning Star, but with most of her cannons damaged, it does not end. She diffuses her gravity shadow, and hangs over the battle to serve as a support platform. The bulk of the killing lasts well into the mid-afternoon. Temperatures swell to 190 degrees Fahrenheit, where resting a naked hand on metal will blister the skin in half a second. The bloodiest of the fighting takes place at this miserable hour, and it is then that the Iron Leopards’ armored line finally breaks. With the mighty main corps finding nowhere to retreat, the infantry is pressed against the broken walls of Heliopolis and butchered.

The bodies stack five meters high. Infantry choke the giant fissures in the wall. Tanks roll over them in the smoke and their desperation to escape. Many suffocate in the press or drown in mud made of blood, urine, and coolant fluid mixing with the dust.

Those who manage to escape the First Army leak into the city, where they are hunted down by Harnassus’s enraged defenders, the sky rangers, and the aerial infantry dropping from the Morning Star.

I cannot stop the bloodshed. Nor do I stop my own.

Wild and driven mad by the atomic bombardment, the storm, and the desert crossing, my men descend the moral ladder to become demons, severed of any creed they once possessed. The butchery is staggering. Those of the enemy unlucky enough to be cornered can do little but add their corpses to the bulwarks of the dead.

Still they refuse to surrender.

I have never seen such valor. If it is not that, it must be madness.

The Terran legions refuse to yield. They retreat, rally, retreat, rally. Ajax stokes them to a fevered mania. He roams the lines, always just out of my reach. Always sallying forth. Time and again they leak through our assault so that I feel like a man rushing between cracks in a dam trying to hold back a flood with his bare fingers.

I range across the thirty-kilometer front, everywhere and nowhere. I blunt a tank breakout on the western flank, exchange starShells at the foothills of the Hesperides after taking a round to the chest. I chase Gray riflemen into the jagged hoodoos of the

Aigle Mountains to the east. I fight two Obsidian berserkers until they crawl legless toward me still swinging their axes. I stifle a counterattack of Gray heavy infantry and take respite and water in the shade cast by a crashed torchShip before abandoning my fourth starShell of the day. Few remain operational. Those that do drain their energy cores before the sun begins to set—a full thirty-eight hours after the battle began.

When Ajax is left alone with a cadre of his personal guard after attempting a breakout, he finds himself cut off. When he sees me coming, he finally takes flight with a fifty-strong core of Peerless. A cry of mockery goes through my legions. I set off in pursuit, but my boots have little energy left. Thraxa likewise only makes it five klicks before doubling back to see me exchanging my gravity boots. She sits down in the shade of the tank beside me and sifts through a stack of battery spikes, inserting one at a time to rebuild her pulseArmor’s charge.

“Fuckin’ snakeshit,” she growls in disappointment. “I wanted that Grimmus head.”

A munition slams into the top of the tank above our heads, and skitters into the sky to detonate. We barely look.

“Atalantia might demand it from him after this,” I say.

I wait for her to finish off the last bat spike. She picks up her gore-spattered hammer. “Ready?”

“Was waiting on you.”

None keep up with me the entire battle, not even Thraxa or Screwface. I rotate bodyguards by the hour, surviving off stims injected into the neck or snorted from smashed cartridges or chewed with my cracked molars. The world is thin and two-dimensional, color leached like a faded mural in the ruins of a child’s bedroom. My body is lead. The cells leeched of energy. Stims doing nothing but thinning my patience. The restraint that keeps me from sobbing or laughing maniacally is only as substantial as porcelain.

As the sun begins to set, I hitch a ride on a transport missing its back half to the top of the storm wall.

There I watch the spasms of the desert storm. Waves of sands blanket the fallen. The ranks of the dead stretch farther than the eye can see. My hysterical mind wanders. For a delusional moment I believe the planet knows how far those boys and girls are from home and thinks they are asleep, so it sends them blankets of sand to tuck them in for the night.

A tight pain squeezes my chest. The breath goes out of me. Flanked by exhausted bodyguards, I hunch there on the shriveled husk of a broken gun. Harnassus arrives on the wall with a dozen lieutenants in tow. He stares at me as if I were inside out. “Here you bloody are! I’ve crossed the entire front,” he barks. “They must have released psychotropic gas. Every single man I spoke to swears on his mother that he saw you. Where have you been?”

“Everywhere,” Screwface growls from my side.

Harnassus looks confused. He looks ragged. A nasty gash on his forehead leaks blood.

“Report,” I rasp. His eyes narrow.