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“Ow,” I say. They help me sit up. The armor-penetrating round pierced the starShell but was stopped by the pulseArmor underneath. The arms and legs of the suit won’t respond. Pebble and Weed help me activate the ejection port. The mech splinters apart and I crawl out, still dazed from the shot. There’s a dent in my pulseArmor.

“Where’s Thraxa?” Sevro looks around.

“Here,” she says, rushing up.

“Still got that baby nuke?” he asks, his face enraged.

“Yes, sir.”

“Give it.”

She unholsters the nuke launcher from the back of her armor and hands it to him. Without even lowering his helmet, he jumps thirty meters upward to clear the ridgeline. He hovers a half second in the air and fires. The small missile shrieks out of the tube. He lets gravity claim him and falls back to the beach as we rush to shelter against the ridgeline. He saunters over without a smile. There’s a flash of blinding light. The earth shudders. A blast wave of sand and debris roars over our heads and huge waves crash against the island. In the distance, the black distortion surrounding the Ash Lord’s island flickers and disappears, revealing the horizon.

I climb back out to see the devastation the half-megaton missile has caused to the island’s coastline. Smoke and dust particles clog the sky. A horrible wound has been carved into the Ash Lord’s island. The mushroom cloud blossoms. And above it, deeper inland where the white fortress of the Ash Lord towers upon the high peaks, sunlight catches on iron men.

Finally, the Golds have come to war.

I unfurl my razor and look to my Howlers. “For the Republic.”

I SOAR WITH THE HOWLERS into the wake of the nuclear blast, skinned in mechanized armor, smeared with char and blood, aimed like a driven spear toward the tower of the Ash Lord. The killsquad of armored Golds races to meet us. They are nearly twenty in number. Each will be a sworn Peerless of Legio XIII Dracones—dragoons. His elite bodyguards and exterminators. It was men wearing the sea dragon badge who liquidated Reds on Mars by the millions and dropped the nuclear ordnance that destroyed New Thebes, and who dumped my men captured on the battlefield out the back of transport ships three kilometers up.

They must all die.

Fire and mini-missiles streak between the war parties. Shields flash and armor buckles as life is ripped from men. Thraxa fires an EMP missile. It detonates amongst the Golds. None drop from the sky. They have the new EMP shielding too.

A Howler’s body is blown to bits in front of me. Two dragoons die as Sevro’s particle cannon slices through their ranks. Using Thraxa’s starShell to shield me in my thinner personal armor, I fly in her shadow and raise my razor ahead of me like a charging knight, the blade straight and true.

And then, just shy of the speed of sound, the two war parties of machine and men meet in the sky. They clang together like squadrons of fallen angels. A horror of metal. A scream of guns and fire and shimmering swords and engines. Milia spears a Gold through his head with her razor, then is cut in two by a passing sword. Her body divides and spins down without a sound. I block the same man’s blade aimed at Thraxa’s head as he rips past us. The force numbs my arm to the socket, but I hold on to the blade, plunging into their ranks. I launch off Thraxa’s flank and gore the chest of a Gold as we slam together. I twist myself at the last second so his blade nicks off my helmet. Without the starShell’s protection, I feel the wheeze of my bones as they nearly snap against the force of our bodies colliding. My vision wavers and we tumble.

We slam down on an outcropping of rock beneath, metal limbs tangled together. My helm is inches from his jaguar helm. He pushes his pulseFist toward my head. I let go my razor and use a kravat arm hold, pinning his arm to the side as I bring my own pulseFist to his belly and fire on full auto. His body melts in half and superheated stone kicks up from the mountain cleft to skitter against my visor. I push his smoldering corpse off and struggle to my feet as his legs flop off the ledge to the white rocks below. But before I can rise again into the air, I’m shot in the back. My skin sizzles as my pulseShield caves in and my armor melts into my lower back. I bellow in anger and jump off the ledge, swerving madly in the air to avoid my pursuer. I glance back just as Sevro smashes the Golden knight down into the mountainside with his starShell. Using the mech’s incredible power, he peels off the man’s arms and stomps his armored head flat. Another Gold rips past, strafing him with his pulseFist. Sevro lurches one of his starShell’s mechanized hands up and grabs the Gold’s foot. He jerks the leg so hard in the other direction that the opposing forces tear off the man’s leg at the hip. He spins off and collides into the mountainside at two hundred kilometers an hour.

“Get inside the tower! There has to be a door on the landing pad,” Sevro shouts. He fires up at the dogfight above him. “Without a starShell you’ll die out here. Get the Ash Lord.”

But it is my Howlers who are dying.

Our effort to pierce the Gold formation has failed. The battle has broken down into aerial dogfights and men killing each other on the face of the mountainside and against the walls of the tower. Our starShells gave us the edge, but the Golds are more maneuverable in their pulseArmor, and have the numbers. They’re overwhelming the powerful mechs like jackals taking down lions.

I see Thraxa’s mech fending off six Golds in an aerial cage. Men broken by her power hammer litter the mountainside below. She smas

hes another out of the air, but she’s speared from behind. Another hacks off her mech’s left hand. And a third stabs at her stomach repeatedly before Tongueless smashes into them. Below, in a ravine, Pebble stands fighting over Clown’s broken mech.

“Rally to the roof!” I call over the coms, signal going through now that the darkzone interference has gone. Sevro echoes the call.

The remaining Howlers fight their way to the roof to join Sevro and me as we fly up the mountain toward the high tower. At the top, the landing pad nearly sixty meters across is being used by a Gray sniper team and Obsidian reinforcements. They retreat as we land, seeking shelter behind the long wings of the Ash Lord’s personal shuttle.

Sevro and I land on the edge together and fight back a squad of Obsidians and Grays. I rocket into them at full speed, breaking the rib cage of a Gray against the concrete. Rolling up, I deflect the huge axe of an Obsidian and shoot him in the head. His helmet takes the blast, but I stun him enough to hew through his legs with my razor. I’m hit from the side by a Gold pulseFist before I can finish him. My shield absorbs it. I shoot up on my gravBoots, then straight down in front of him to exchange a series of razor slashes that ends with his arm off at the shoulder. Someone shoots him from the side. Sevro kicks a Gray off the roof with the boot of his mech. An Obsidian launches toward him and stabs a pulseSpear into his cockpit. He moves his head at the last moment, then pulls the Obsidian off. Blood showers his mech as he crushes the Obsidian’s head with a squeeze of his mechanized hand. Green plasma rounds pound the legs of his mech, melting them inoperable. A squad of hunched Grays fires at him from across the landing pad with huge anti-armor plasma rifles. I fire at them, cutting a hole of steaming meat through their ranks. Too late. An EMP rocket slams into the chest of Sevro’s mech. Blue electricity sizzles out, frying his circuitry. He manually ejects, shooting straight up, over the heads of Alexandar and Tongueless, who fight like mad together against the tide.

I lose Sevro in the fray.

The enemy presses in, firing at us from the air above, chewing into our ranks. I’m slammed sideways by a concussion munition. As I try to gain my balance, an Obsidian a head taller than me hits me in the chest with a pulseHammer. My pulseShield shorts out. My armor caves inward. I feel several ribs crack and I tumble back. He knocks me to the ground before I can lift my head. Stomps on my hand as I try to stab him with my razor. His axe lifts high into the air, the moment slowing. Thraxa lies pinned to the ground, a razor in her thigh. Alexandar tries desperately to reach me. I roar in fear as the pulseAxe comes down. It smashes through my helmet. The energy blade glows with a pale fire, its edge centimeters from my face, held back by squealing metal. The heat radiates into my eyeballs, filling them with aching pressure. The Obsidian wrenches the axe sideways. My helmet rips from its sockets. He cries his war chant and kneels on my chest, a crooked knife in his hand. He grabs my hair with an armored hand and saws on the front of my forehead to claim my scalp.

Bazzoooohhh. Bazzoooohhh.

A trumpet’s clarion call rides in with the wind. The Obsidian looks up to see a flight of armored knights falling from the sky, a violent figure in purple Minotaur armor at their head. The Minotaur lands before the Obsidian and hacks him in half with a running two-handed upward blow.

Apollonius has come.

His knights fall upon the Ash Guard, carving them with razors and smashing them off the face of the landing pad till not one is left alive. Apollonius sings as he kills the Golds and lurchers who try to make a last stand at the doorway down into the fortress.