3. Bellicus

bellicus ~a ~um, a.

1. of or pertaining to war

2. warlike

Hangar six is very cold.

The Station as a whole never runs out of cold. Space is everywhere around us—cold is in great supply. It’s heat that matters. Heat is survival.

Once a year, the nobles cut heating to Low Ward to “reserve Station energy.” They even have the gall to call it a holiday—Winterfolly. Fog gathers in the streets, and the sulfuric acid leaking from the vents crystallizes to neon spears. People freeze to death in their beds, and yet the nobles insist we should celebrate it.

All the hate in my heart has become a single blade stabbing me forward.

The fog of hangar six is thicker than even Winterfolly. I can barely see. How am I supposed to find my way to the steed’s saddle like this?

“Decontamination beginning in five, four, three, two…”

A calm mechanical voice resounds, and I wince away from the blue laser that suddenly shoots toward me. It spiders out over my body, a net of beams parsing every angle—some kind of ID system. I must pass, because the winged helmet and white suit abruptly seal together under my chin. There’s a searing hiss as my ears pop and adjust, and in one helmet-muted rush, the thick mist in the hangar gets sucked somewhere else, leaving only clean, white-gold marble walls behind.

“Decontamination complete. Please proceed to the saddle.”

The voice is as cool as I am burning with suppressed fear. Space is not forgiving, even inside a steed. Riders die riding, but they are few and far between. During tourney season, the news reports more on riders’ broken limbs and loss of brain function—but I must die in this steed. Not just an injury—real, final death. There is no other option; my death must hurt House Hauteclare as my life could not.

Out of the corner of my visor, I spot slick movement—a door sliding open in the marble wall. The only exit.

I have learned that when fear bites, you must bite back, or it will eat you whole.

I walk forward, ignoring my thumping heart.

The next room is nearly identical; the only difference is the circle on the ground big enough to hold three people comfortably and made entirely of black glass, bordered at the base with a glowing emerald ring. Every steed has a saddle—the seat from which the rider can control the steed. That must be it.

I step in and wait, trembling. After a moment, the ring of green rises with a rumble, thin and translucent and painting the world emerald as it closes up around me into a hard-light tube. Something suddenly splats onto the black glass next to my foot—a pale periwinkle glob—and then another and another. I catch one in my hand; it feels like the cheap med-gel one can find in any first-aid kit.

At first, I think it’s oil-based because of the rainbow shine, but…the shine is from thousands of strange, shimmering silver whorls moving slowly inside. I lean down to sniff it. It’s bitter, with hints of citrus. What the hell is—

A click echoes above my head.

I look up just in time to see the ceiling open and slop a wave of gel on me. I scrabble against the hard-light wall, but there’s nowhere to run—the gel just keeps pouring in, filling the tube to my waist, my shoulders. If it reaches my helmet’s air vents, I’ll suffocate. But no—if every rider suffocated in the saddle, there’d be no tourneys.

The shimmering silver whorls writhe in the gel. They look like worms or tadpoles or cells, small and struggling to survive. Are they nanomachines? It’s possible; nobles tend to keep the best technology for themselves, and steeds are only for nobles.

Even as the strange gel fills the tube up to my neck, I feel no pressure from it; in fact, I feel lighter, as if my body is being supported rather than weighed down. The gel reaches my visor, and in a blink I’m submerged. Bravery is not something you do, it’s something you endure, and I endure until the gel seeps into the air vents in my helmet. It feels as cool as velvet on my nose and eyes. I hold my breath, but there’s no air left, and I gasp open, sucking the gel deep into my lungs as I flail my arms against the tube’s walls. It floods my mouth with a bitter citrus taste and dissolves instantly on my tongue, and then I swallow oxygen like air. As soon as I realize I can breathe in this stuff, the chest-deep panic in me subsides, and I go still. Still alive.

Still, I will get my revenge.

A muffled jolt runs through the ground then. The silvery gel blocks out everything, but the bone-shaking vibrations tell me I’m moving lower, until there’s a resounding click into place.

Down comes the lightning.

Electricity blazes through my body, burning away my calm with pain—can’t move—my lips pulling back from my teeth, my eyelids frozen open. Through my spasming vision, I see the silver whorls in the gel glow brighter and start to writhe faster than ever before, pinwheels, whirlpools—and when the pain abruptly fades, it’s replaced by a feeling of knowing. I know I’m not alone.

Something’s here, right next to me, hovering all around me. It’s the certainty of someone standing behind you in a dream. It’s the hot prickle of eyes watching the back of your head, of someone’s invisible body heat looming close. Someone huge, bigger even than Red Rider. Someone not-me.

And then it moves.

Before terror can take hold, it reaches out for me gently; a featherlight, cautious touch, something I can feel in my mind but can’t see—a reverse headache, a finger pressing against the inside of my skull. It feels like curiosity, but not my own; the inquisitive head tilt of a dog. It’s like an invitation, an unseeable hand reaching out to me.

This is the line. This is the hairpin turn of fate I cannot see around. This is death.

“You must wait for God to punish them, Synali.”

No, Mother. I will not.

I reach back.

In an instant, my body goes fever-hot and ice-cold, sweating then clammy, and I grow. I feel bigger, expanded, like my limbs have been stretched far longer than they actually are. My chest is the only thing that still feels normal, filled with my heavy heartbeat. I don’t know what the hell is going on; all I know is that this is the saddle. All I know is that the thing in here with me is huge, and I’m small. We’re different, but the pressureless gel and the electricity have…linked us somehow. Put us in each other’s thoughts.

“Handshake complete.” The cool mechanical voice reverberates in my helmet. “Prepare for immediate deployment in seven, six, five, four, three—”

Is this feeling…the steed? It feels like a person. My mind instantly pivots to true AI, the sort banned a hundred years ago after it rebelled. False AI is used for everything on the Station, from cleaning sub-routines to surgical machines, but true AI is illegal. Not even nobles are misguided enough to put true AI in their steeds—they want things they can control, and the true AI our ancestors made cannot be controlled anymore. That’s why the king before King Ressinimus ordered it destroyed.

“Whatever you are,” I murmur, “I ask only that you kill me.”

“—two, one.”

The floor beneath our feet clicks open, and we fall.

My organs crush up into my throat, a fist punching me from inside, but weightlessness quickly takes over, everything catching on nothing, and then we free-float in zero gravity. Either the entire Station’s gravity generators have failed or we’re in…

The silver whorls in the gel slowly dissolve from my visor, allowing me sight again: the sight of a glass-clear darkness scattered with trillions upon trillions of cold, sharp, pinprick stars.

…Space.

Soundless, airless, lifeless—space opens to me like a horrific black flower, the center of its petals the glaring white sun in the distance. Accidents flash before my eyes—hull breaches in Low Ward; bodies sucked out into space coming back freezer-burned, mummified, and with every cavity imploded; Father’s dead-warm skin peeling with frost the very moment I vented him.

No frost on my skin. Still breathing. I must be inside Father’s steed.

The big feeling, the longer limbs but hot chest core… It makes sense in a twisted, fumbling way. I’ve seen it on the vis—nobles riding massive steeds as tall as buildings into space for their self-important tourneys. The stories are clear: four hundred years ago, the knights of the War went into space on their gigantic steeds to defend Earth against the enemy. But seeing and reading are not doing. Doing is lung-crushing. Doing is terrifying.

I am riding.

Well, floating, at least. I look down to see sleek, pure-white metal limbs below me—legs—and hands the same color tipped with gold on the fingers. It’s like looking at my own body but made huge and too shiny.

They say God made man in his image, but so, too, did man make the steeds in theirs.

A steed is a gigantic artificial human, armored. It stands upright on thick legs and feet, with a waspish torso flaring out to a broad chest and arms and finally a helmeted head, usually with no visible eye, ear, or mouth holes—holes are structural weaknesses in space. Plasma vents dot the feet, the ankles, the torso, and the back. Every metal edge of a steed is sanded smooth, stylishly yet uselessly, considering aerodynamics are nigh pointless in a vacuum; when nobles want something beautiful, they make it so at all costs.

I slowly move farther into space as a holographic screen springs to life in front of me and hangs there among the stars in high definition, displaying two men in decadent breast coats and headsets. They sit before stands filled to bursting with a seething audience. I recognize them: the court-appointed tourney commentators.

“Welcome, one and all, to the 148th annual Cassiopeia Cup Semifinals!”

The thunderous roar of the crowd nearly drowns them out completely, but it all goes dull in my ears when my eyes find the Station. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen my home from the outside. I know the shape of it—a metal ring lined with honeycomb projection shields the hue of rainbow oil-slick, a spire running through it like a pierced halo, and the many hard-light highways connecting the two like bright-orange spokes in a wheel, trams zipping to and fro on their underbellies.

The gas giant the Station orbits—Esther—hangs swollen and green behind it. Dozens of substations circle her massive bulk—some attached to her many moons, some free-floating, but all of them smaller, all of them slowly terraforming her surface, as they have been since the War’s end four hundred years ago, when the seven Stations were flung from Earth’s orbit and into distant solar systems by the enemy’s final attack.

He’s out there somewhere. Father.

My eyes dart around the Station, the spindle where the nobles live in its center, the thousands of solar panels facing both into Esther—terrene—and out toward the stars—sidereal. There’s no sign of his corpse, no graying hair, no ruffled cuffs, no white cape. I can’t see Father’s body at all, but I slammed the airlock button, watched the evidence of my murder drift into nothing…so where is he? Esther’s gravity wouldn’t pull him down that fast.

Another holoscreen interrupts my view—the commentator’s face is too happy.

“We have a fantastic clash for you today, folks! The storied House Hauteclare gears up at last against the indomitable House Velrayd—two families known for their pride and prowess on the tilt! Who will overcome? Who will fall? Only heaven knows!”

I try to wave the holoscreen away, but it doesn’t fade like a vis screen. Another voice patches into my helmet with a smoky rumble—Red Rider.

“Forgive my figure of speech, but what the flying fuck are you doing, Mirelle? This isn’t amateur hour—get to your tilt.”

A crimson dot cuts through space, coming toward me. I’ve seen steeds on the vis, on posters, and in the hands of children as figurines, but not like this: huge and framed against the cold blanket of space and the green glow of Esther and all too big, all too real, coming close all too fast. Nothing that big should move that gracefully.

Red Rider’s steed is painted like drying blood—crimson diffused by deep brown—and it’s roughly the length of an entire tram. Its helmet has a beaklike protrusion on the mouth that sweeps up the forehead and over the skull as if it’s the crest of a bird, and its heels have the same feather shape. For a second, I wonder where his saddle is: in the chest or the head? Where are we positioned as riders in these gargantuan puppets? I look down to my steed’s titanic white chest. I must be in the torso somewhere—that feels central.

Red Rider jets over to me, and I watch, momentarily mesmerized, as the crimson plasma the steed produces lingers behind it like hot twin ribbons, and then the cold of space dissolves them. Eats them. Heat is survival, but only now have I realized it’s beautiful, too.

Too late.

His gravelly voice on the comms is insistent. “Did your initial thrust screw up or something? Here, lemme help.”

I don’t need your goddamn help, noble.

No buttons in the saddle, no levers to pull—only my own body floating in gel that’s now turned clear as glass. Whatever switches Red Rider uses to move his steed, I can’t see them. My steed is unresponsive—I can’t even twitch away as he laces our metal arms together. The sensation of him touching my elbow makes me jump—skin-on-skin pressure on get the fuck away from me. The feedback is exactly like touching in real life. I mentally flip him off, and surprise sizzles through me when the golden fingers of my steed’s free hand mimic my thoughts perfectly. The same middle finger—the same exact wrist tilt.

Red Rider chuckles. “You wanna give me the silent treatment that badly? Go right ahead. It’s not gonna stop me from helping a fellow rider out. You know, chivalry? That thing you love so much?”

I only hear him faintly—too busy closing my fist experimentally. I go wide-eyed as the fist of the white-gold steed closes, too. The delay is nonexistent—like watching my reflection move in a mirror. I’m not just inside the steed—I am the steed.

Slowly, Red Rider tows me to the tilt: a span of what would look like empty space if not for the floating hexagonal plates on opposite sides bookending it. I can only estimate the distance between the two plates—fifty parses apart, maybe more. In the direct middle of the tilt is the unmistakable blue glow of a gravity generator, hanging like an azure star in the stretch of black, but this one is much brighter than the ones in the Station’s walls. It must be a short-range grav-gen, the sort used in the War to launch battleships and steeds alike with its slingshot effect.

When we reach one of the plates, Red Rider presses my floating body against it—his fingertips on my chest trigger instant venomous thoughts—don’t try to control me, you entitled piece of shit. With a vicious jolt, magnetics kick in and rivet my spine to the tilt. I glare straight ahead, refusing to look at him.

“Well,” he starts jovially, “I’m off. Best of luck and for the glory of the king and all that.”

His steed makes a little salute—red fingers to red forehead—and then he pivots, the jets on his back and feet blazing crimson as he propels past the halfway point of the grav-gen to the hexagonal plate on the other end of the tilt. He moves easily—obviously academy trained. He chose academy. Noble children like him get to decide their own cushy fates while the rest of us scrape at dangerous, back-breaking jobs: servitude, welding, mining on the substations…things that break, kill, maim. Commoners are disposable, after all—the brothel taught me that. Father taught me that. He treated Mother like something to be used and then thrown away.

My anger simmers high, a fire that cannot be stopped, a fire I will not stop, and it burns and burns and burns, and strangely, I feel the thing in here with me start to burn, too, anger coursing molten all around me.

My mother is dead, and I killed my father. I’m alone in this life. I know that.

But for the first time in six months, there’s the barest venting of pressure, a release in knowing something else in this universe—anything else—burns the same way I do.

I will go down in fire, and the flames will scar every Hauteclare on this godforsaken Station.