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THE FURY

SILENT, SHE WAITS FOR the sky to fall, standing upon an island of volcanic rock aht yawns before her The only sounds, a flapping banner of war held in her lover’s hand and the aves that kiss her steel boots Her heart is heavy Her spirit wild Peerless knights tower behind her Salt spray beads on their faold sphinxes, and the crowned skull of her father’s gri The water heaves in Out The heartbeat of her silence

THE CITY

Tyche, the jewel of Mercury, hunches in fear between the lass and lie is e er planet at sunset for the first tih her streets, pushed by salty suers at the wharf Gone are the patter of pedestrian feet on the cobbles and the ruhter of the lowColor children who ju summer days when the Trasmian sea winds are still The city is quiet, its wealthy already gone to desert overnment bunkers, its soldiers on its rooftops wat

ching the sky, its poor having left for the desert or upon cramped boats destined for the Ismere Islands

But the city is not empty

Huddled masses fill the public transit systems that wend beneath the waves And in the upstairsof a tenees of the city, far froirl with Orange eyes fogs the ith her breath The night sky sparks Flashing and flaring with spurts of light like the fireworks her brother sometimes buys at the corner shop She’s been told there is a battle between big fleets high up there She has never seen a starship Her mother lies sick in the bedrooines, sits at the little plastic dinner table with his sons, knowing he cannot protect therairl carries a folded piece of paper that she found in the gutter On it is a little curved sword She’s seen it before on the cube Her teachers at the governs chaos War It has set the spheres on fire But now she secretly draws the blade in the fog her breath has made on the , and she feels brave

Then the boin to fall

THE BOMBS

They coh-orbit Thor-class bombers piloted by farmboys from Earth and miners from Mars of the Twelfth Sunshine Squadron Curses and prayers and tribal dragons and curved scythes have been sprayed upon theh the clouds and fall over the sea, outracing their own sound Their guidance chips are made by freeColors on Phobos Their steel is mined and sines are staed heel of a company that makes consumer electronics and toiletries and weapons Down and down they go to race shadowless over the desert, then the sea, carrying the weight of the newest empire under the sun

The first bomb destroys the Hall of Justice on Tyche’s Vespasian Island Then it burrows a hundred ainst the bunker buried there, killing all inside The second lands in the sea, fifteen kiloees, where it sinks a Society warship, hiding under the chop The third races over a spine of un round fired froer with acne scars and the charm of a sweetheart around his neck It careens off its course and sputters across the sky before falling to the earth

It detonates on the fringes of the city, far fro to dust

THE REAPER

Silent, he lies encased inStar The fear ss him now as it has done time and time before The only sound is the whir of his armor’s air filtration unit and the radio chatter of distant men and women Around hi Eyes Red and Gold and Gray and Obsidian Wolfheads mark their pauldrons Tattoos their necks and arms Wild empire breakers from Mars and Luna and Earth Beyond them fly ships with nanar They are painted white and led by a won said the white was for spring For a new beginning But the ships are stained Smeared with char and patched wounds and mismatched panels They broke the Sword Armada and the martyr Fabii They conquered the heart of the Gold empire They battled back the Ash Lord to the Core and have kept the dragons of the Rim at bay

How could they ever stay clean?

Alone in his arirl who began it all He remembers how her Red hair fell over her eyes How her hter How she breathed as she lay atop hiile in a world far too cold She has been dead longer than she was ever alive And now that her dreanize it And he wonders too if he were to die today, would he recognize the echo of his own life? What sort of man would his son become in this world he has made? He thinks of his son’s face and how soon he will become a man And he thinks of his Golden wife How she stood on the landing pad, looking up at hiain

More than anything, he wants this to end

Then the machine takes hold

He feels the tug on his body The pounding of his heart Theof the Goblin and the howls of his friends as they try to forget their children, their loves, and be brave Nausea in his gut rises as the e behind hih the launch tube out into silent space at six times the speed of sound