IN A SMALL CORNER BOOTH in a shady back room of a cesspit, two slags are slouched drinking out of dirty glasses like pervy old gargoyles. They look up as I make my way through the neon-green demondust smoke that wafts from the burners of two Red mechanics.
South of Hyperion City Center, hundred sixty klicks from the maple-lined boulevards of the Promenade, towers the brutalist Atlas Interplanetary Docks. There are seven main towers to the AID, each inhuman in its size. Atlas sees one billion travelers pass through his halls every Earth-standard year. But for every new oligarch and old-blood Gold that lands here, there’s a flood of space mariners and interplanetary immigrants and passengers. All these weary travelers crave restaurants, casinos, hotels, and whorehouses before taking transit to whatever their final destination on Luna might be.
It’s a tumor that won’t stop growing; that’s why it’s called the Mass.
Behind me, through the open doorway, electric signs and high-resolution digital flesh fishhook the eyes, pulling travelers from their trams or private aircars. Jerking them headlong into the vestibules of commerce to pump blood and cash into the veins of this hinterland city. It’s the sort of place you go to forget about your life. But, in the irony to end all ironies, it’s where mine began.
The bar looked different back then. I was two years out of the legion and had come to the Mass to burn a few credits with some squaddies from Piraeus. Two drinks in, some idiot spilled a glass of spiked milk down the back of my neck. I swung around to teach the prick some manners, but one look at that goofy face and baggy suit, I started laughing so hard I couldn’t raise a fist. The man stared back at me with a milk mustache and wide, apologetic eyes. Who the hell orders milk in a place like this? The man was young, simple, and two years into the legion from some Earth backwater. We sat and talked in that corner booth and closed the place down. Rest was history.
He was my refuge. My small-town boy with a big heart and a bigger laugh. Jove knows what he saw in me.
“I beg your pardon,” I say to the slags in the corner booth. They eye my rumpled suit, wondering if I’m lost.
“Wajoowant?” the Brown one asks. He’s a Terran bastard by the look of his thick thighs. His loamy eyes narrow.
“I reserved this booth, citizen,” I say.
“Deey don’t take reservations here. Slag off.”
“Sit there,” says the larger man, a Gray with a sour look. “And shut it ’fore you get carved up.” He points to a nearby open table and flashes a curved ionKnife the size of my forearm. It shimmers blue as he activates its charge.
“And you’re gonna do the carving?” I ask wryly. “You don’t look like you can even stand.” He stands.
“Please, bitch. I used to own little sleets like you in Whitehold,” the Gray says. By the look of his knotted forearms, he could easily break me to kindling. I should just move on.
“Whitehold?” I scoff. “That’s odd. I thought they sent pig sodomizers to Deepgrave.” Both stand, blades shimmering in the low light. I stumble backward, too late in realizing my tongue’s drunker than the rest of me.
The Gray’s about to come and try to open me up with that cutter of his when he sees something behind me and stops dead. There’s silence in the bar. Something fiendishly unique has just walked through the door behind me. And anything unique enough to this sort of crowd could only mean one thing.
She came after all.
I turn to see a Gray woman my height, but built like a snub-nosed boxer with the physical dimensions of a concrete building block. Freckles, made dark by her time under the harsh Mercurian sun, maul an ugly, broad nose, while her hair, shaved on the sides of the head, shoots up from the top of her head like a surfacing great white. Her military uniform is all black, but every eye, wary bartender to dazed whore, scans the red flying-horse standard on the forearms of her jacket and the matted wolfcloak that hangs from her left shoulder. Pegasus Legion, Howler Battalion. One of the Reaper’s own.
The woman strides past me up to the men blocking our path to the booth. “Move.” They dip their heads politely and back away. She sits down and pours two shots of what remains of their whiskey into the glasses, wipes one glass for herself, and nods to me. I join her as she tosses them a gold Octavia. A hundred-credit Lune crescent. Still the currency of the day, despite the Rising’s sad attempts to mint new legal tender. “For the whiskey, citizens.”
They skulk away and conversations slowly start again throughout the bar. The woman looks back to me, flinty eyes searching.
“Holiday ti Nakamura, the Howler. In the leathery flesh,” I say.
“Ephraim ti Horn. The dumbass with a death wish.” She jerks her head at the two thugs. “What’s your damage?”
“The usual. Would you like a thank-you for saving my ass?”
“Don’t thank me yet; night’s young. Besides, the Obsidian with the railgun over there might be a bit too much for you to chew.”
“Huh?”
“Far side, second booth. Big girl with the bulge under the armpit.” She jerks her head to a shadowy booth where a large shape is hunched in the shadows over a drink with an umbrella in it. In the haze from the vodka and pills, I didn’t even notice her there. “You’re slipping, Eph,” Holiday says as she warily sniffs the whiskey bottle.
“Dammit.” I sigh. “I’ll be right back.”
“Do you need help?”
“Only if you have tickets to the zoo.”
“What?”
“Don’t ask.”
I stalk across the bar. Volga hunches sheepishly as if she can sink into the shadow of the booth so I won’t see her. She gives up when I snap my fingers at her. “Outside.”
Rain drips sluggishly down from the green awning over the bar’s entrance. The bar itself is in a block of restaurants and drinking holes directly abutting a multilevel thoroughfare. Past the small retaining wall is a precipitous drop down into the concrete canyon between the buildings. I push Volga in the chest. “You stalking me now?”
“No…”
“Volga.”
“Yes,” she admits. “I am worried about you.”
“Worried about me? You’re the one who can barely catch a cab without me.”
“I tracked you, did I not?”
“So I taught you something at least. But not how to mind your own business, you dumb giant.”
“You seemed sad….”
“Not your problem. You got enough of those, don’t make me one of them.”
“But we’re friends. Friends look out for each other.” She nods inside. “Who is that? Her cloak…”
“That’s none of your damn business.”
“But…”
“We’re not friends, Volga.” I push a finger in her chest and stare up at her bluff face. “We work together. Business associates. That is the totality of our relationship.” She stands there as if I’ve struck her. I sigh in annoyance. “Go home. And stop following me just because you don’t have your own life.” I don’t have to tell her twice. She hunches her shoulders against the rain and disappears up a flight of stairs to the taxi level above.
I head back inside, where Holiday has made some progress on the bottle, but her chair is shifted, like she’s just gotten out of it. Did she listen at the door?
“You know her?” she asks.
“No,” I snap.
“Right. Well…It’s good to see you, Eph.” She traces the rim of her glass with a callused finger. “To be honest, I’m surprised you came.”
“Ouch. Thought I wouldn’t care anymore?”
“Thought you wouldn’t remember Trigg’s birthday.”
“And I thought your messiah master wouldn’t let you off the leash for some R&R. Don’t you have a parade to attend?”
“That was yesterday. But you knew that.”
I shrug. “Well, this place has gone to shit.”
“Yut. I preferred the tiki torches to whatever this is…” She trails off and gestures to the green lighting and myriad lowlifes.
I snort. “Maybe we’re just getting too cultured. Still, has to be better than the Mercury sand belt.”
“Hell yes it is,” she says heavily. She’s never been a looker, but the latest tour has been hard on her. Still, most of the wear seems on the inside. She sits at the table with the weight of the planet pressing her down into the whiskey bottle.
“You fall in the Rain?” I ask. She nods. “Saw the newsreels. Looked like a shitshow. What’s one of those like? A Rain?”
She shrugs. “Good for weapons contractors. Hostile to the human experience for everyone else.”
“To the returning hero and her perspicacity.” I raise my glass.
She tips her glass to me. “To the malignant underachiever.”
We click our glasses together and down the liquor. It’s cheap enough I can taste the plastic of the bottle it came in, ration fare. My glass is refilled before it reaches the table. We do another. More after that. Drinking till it’s murdered proper. Holiday examines the remnants of her last glass, wondering how it came so soon. She reminds me of all soldiers who’ve come home from the war. Worlds unto themselves. Tense, eyes constantly assessing. She awkwardly tries to make conversation, because she knows she’s supposed to. “So…what’s new? You still contracting?”
“You know me. Kite in the wind.” I swish and swoosh my finger through the air.
“Which corp?”
“You wouldn’t know ’em.” She doesn’t smile. I wonder if it hurts her to see me as much as it hurts me to see her. I was afraid of this. Of coming here. Sliding back into it all.
“So, you’re living good and easy.”
“Only thing easy is entropy.”
“That’s funny.”
“It’s not mine.” I shrug. “I stay busy.”
“There are other ways to stay busy. Meaningful ways.”
“Tried that.” My hand instinctively drifts to my chest where the scars from the Gold are hidden under my suit jacket. I notice her watching my hand. I drop it. “Didn’t take.” Her datapad buzzes on her arm. “On call?” I ask. She silences it without looking down.
“Grand theft’s gone up. They’ve got a task force now. The Sovereign is tired of this city’s culture being plundered for the highest bidder.”
“The Sovereign, eh. How’s old Lionheart? Still giving out Amnesty passes to murderers and slavers?”
“That still under your skin?”
“Grays: short in life, long in memory. Forget that little jingle? Tell me, does the new task force have a pretty insignia? I bet they do. Maybe a flying tiger or a lion with a sword in its lustrous mouth?”
“You were the one who chose to leave the Rising, Eph.”
“You know why I left.”
“If you didn’t like how things were going, you could have stuck around, made a difference. But I guess it’s easier sitting in the cheap seats, throwing bottles.”
“Make a difference?” I smile nastily. “You know, when the Hyperion Trials started, I thought there’d finally be some justice. Honest to Jove. I thought the Golds would finally pay the bill. Even after Endymion, even after what they did to my boys…” I touch my chest again. “But then your Sovereign got cold feet. Sure, some Society military brass, some high-up psychos from the Board of Quality Control got life in Deepgrave, but more got full pardons because she needed their men, their money, their ships. So much for justice.”
Holiday holds my gaze, willful.
After Trigg died on that Martian peak, I joined the Rising. More for revenge than anything else. I wasn’t a believer. Eventually they put my Piraeus and legion-honed skills and understanding of Gold culture to use hunting Peerless war criminals down. Used to call ourselves “scar hunters.” Just another slick name.
I know I shouldn’t press the politics with her. She’s as thick in the head and set in her ways as ever. Just another grunt seduced by the pretty demigods. But the booze is making me care.
“You know, every time I saw a Gold slaver walk free for the sake of ‘the war effort,’ it was like watching them spit on Trigg’s grave. Aja might be dust, but men and women just like that bitch walk the worlds because the people holding your leash couldn’t follow through. Shoulda put a Gray as Sovereign. At least we finish shit.”
I drain my glass for emphasis and feel like an idiot talking head on an HC show. Cute empty words and flashy maxims.
“You know I can’t help you if you’re caught on a job,” she says.
And like that, I’m dismissed because she’s always right, and I’m always just running my mouth. “Public urination is a victimless crime,” I say with a smile. I pull out a burner and light it.
“I meant what I said last time.”
“About the Hyperion Chimera match? I’d have lost a fortune on that bet. Embarrassing spectacle. But fauxWar is unpredictable, neh? Karachi is a safer bet.”
“The offer is still on the table, Eph. We could use a man like you. Come back. Help us unwind the Syndicate. You can save lives.”
“I am saving a life. Mine. By staying as far away from your masters as humanly possible. Shame Trigg didn’t get the same chance.”
She watches me through the smoke I blow in her face. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”
“Be more specific.”
“This.” She looks around the bar. “This isn’t for him. It’s not even for me. It’s for you. So you can sink in it and let it rot you. That’s not what he would have wanted.”
“What would he have wanted?”
“For you to have a life. A purpose.”
I roll my eyes. “Why’d you bother to come? I didn’t make you.”
“Because my brother loved you,” she says sharply. She lowers her voice. “He would have wanted more for you than this.”
“Then maybe you shouldn’t have gotten him killed.”
The old Holiday wouldn’t hit me. “It’s been ten years, asshole. You have to let him go or it’s gonna eat you up.”
I shrug. “What’s left to eat?” I didn’t deserve her brother’s love, and I sure as shit don’t need her pity. I flag down the bartender and he comes over with another bottle. Holiday shakes her head as I pour myself a glass.
“I’m not coming back here next year.”
“So sorry. Will miss you. Break the chains, and all that.” She stands and stares down at me, about to say something spiteful, but she swallows it down, enraging me because I can smell the pity. “You know what just rubs me raw?” I say up to her. “You look down at me because you’re in that little uniform and you think me cheap. But you’re the one too stupid to realize you’re wearing a collar. You’re the one he’d be ashamed of.”
“The only good thing about him being dead is that he doesn’t have to see you like this. So long, Eph.” At the door, she glances back down at her datapad and a shadow of fear passes over her face from what she sees there. Then she’s gone into the rain.
Two glasses later, I abandon the bottle and stumble out of the bar and onto the sidewalk. Rain drips its way through the labyrinth of city above and below, growing fouler by the level. I go to the edge of the sidewalk and peer over the rusted metal rail down into the airway thoroughfare. It’s a thousand-meter drop to the Mass’s fetid ground level. Flying cars and taxis blink through the gathering fog. From the sides of hulking buildings, advertisements seep miasma stains of neon greens and violent reds into the air like rainbow pus. On a digital billboard, a six-story Red child is wandering alone in the desert. Lips cracked. Skin burnt absurdly. His foot strikes something in the sand, and eagerly he begins to dig and lo, he discovers something buried. A bottle. Feverishly he twists off the top and takes a drink. He laughs with delight and holds the glistening bottle up to the sun, where it sparkles and beads with divine drops of perspiration. The word AMBROSIA sparkles onto the screen, a little wing-heel logo in the corner.
A distant roar comes from the sky as a large passenger ship leaves its berth at AID, aimed at the invisible stars. I drink from my bottle, wishing I’d never left Hyperion for the Mass. Wishing I’d gone to a Pearl club and found a Pink to swallow my attention. Holiday was right about one thing; this just picks at the wound. But if I don’t pick, then it feels like it didn’t matter. And if didn’t matter, then neither do I.
I pull my datapad out with one hand, almost dropping it over the rail, and pull up the last video played. Security cam footage. A wintery landscape fills the air in front of me. Careless raindrops punch through the holo. Trigg is stranded on the bridge to a landing pad that juts out from a mountainside like a waiter’s arm bringing a tray. A huge Gold in blue armor charges him as he runs back to the Reaper. She plunges her blade through his spine out his stomach and hoists him in the air like a street vendor’s kebab. Then she hurls him off the side of the bridge. My love spatters against the rocks beneath. His blood darkens the white snow.
I hurl the datapad down into the abyss, tears and rain blurring my vision. The railing is slippery against my hands as I find myself climbing it. Standing on the edge, looking at the cars beneath and the darkness beyond them. I feel the pain just as sharply as I did ten years ago when Holiday called me. I was in the Piraeus Insurance offices. Didn’t even make a sound when I hung up. I just took off my uniform, ditched my badge, and left that office for the last time.
I could leave that quietly now.
But as I lean forward to go over the edge, something stops me. A hand gripping the back of my jacket. I feel my feet slide out from under me as I’m jerked off the rail back onto the sidewalk. I land hard on the wet concrete, the air rushing out of me. Three pale-faced men in black leather dusters and chrome glasses stare down at me.
“Who the fu—”
A fist the size of a small dog sends me to darkness.