01

Prologue

Sylvia dug her feet into the sand, trying to push herself up far enough under the burning sheet of metal that she wouldn't be seen. The air was on fire. The sky was scorched, soot-black and snowing bits of gray ash that collected here and there in powdery drifts. Her broken right arm still clutched the grip of a ruined revolver, but she couldn't force her hand to open. The arm was numb. Her mouth tasted like blood.

Amid the screams and wrenching crackle of metal burning for miles down the track behind her, Sylvia could hear the footsteps of searchers outside of her hidey-hole. She held her breath and counted the seconds. Foreign voices, male. The screech of something dying. Ice cold mountain wind howling through the shattered remnants of railcar. A pair of booted feet moved into view.

Her terrified mind drank in every detail, stretched every rotten second into an hour. The boots were made of thick, brown leather, well-worn and streaked black and grey from the accumulating ash. Woven cotton thongs interlaced up their fronts, crisscrossing at hard angles up through iron eyelets polished silver from constant friction. Riveted steel plates hung like dragon scales on spats above the boots, and, beneath them, heavy, red uniform pants. The owner of the boots turned his feet to face her.

The world seemed so quiet. She could feel the sting of every cold, raspy breath, could hear it vibrating through her chest. Her numb, broken arm began to shake, rattling the bent barrel of the revolver against the ground. Sylvia grabbed her wrist with her good hand and pulled hard. Pins and needles became daggers and spears in the bad arm, razor blades against her frail nerves that made her mind sway. Another rasping breath. Another. Another. The boots don't move.

Sylvia blinks back tears of helpless frustration. Just do it you bastard, God damn you, just do it. Her nose was running, but she didn't notice. How was it so quiet? A gloved hand, tooled to match the boots, reached down and wrapped its fingers around the edge of the bit of metal shielding. Sylvia's body tensed. Her mind went black. The hand pulled her shelter up and away from her. She screamed and tried to swing the revolver around to bear, but her dumb arm ignored the command.

One of the boots flew forward in an arc, connecting with her jaw and sending her sprawling. She came to with it pressing down hard on her bad arm, and watched as the gloved hand pried the gun from her fingers and tossed it aside. Somebody grabbed her by the back of her neck, his grip nearly encircling her throat, and she was pulled to her feet. A single, gruff command and a sharp jab to her lower back.

"Walk."

Sylvia nodded and complied. Her eyes wandered. Red-cloaked figures moved like phantoms through the white, steaming mists of the smoldering wreckage. They picked through the ruins, noiselessly going about their work as the night winds and the wounded survivors screamed around them. The railcar had derailed in the saddle between two mountains, and now lay bundled up and twisted over itself like a section of discarded intestine. Her captor moved her past a stack of bodies, all in white uniforms. The Imperium escort detail that had been sent along with the railcar.

Sylvia's escort led her to the end of a line of other prisoners, some too wounded even to kneel, and forced her down beside them. She looked down the row, catching the frightened eyes of a few people she knew. Some of them cried, and others just stared out into the wreckage, waiting for what they knew was coming.

"No... please, no," begged some pitiful voice from the other side of the line. Sylvia looked down to see Berthold, the assistant quartermaster, being drug away. "No, no!" She felt the entire line flinch when the gunshot rang out, quieting Berthold. A woman in the line began to cry.

A rough hand grabbed her by the hair and yanked her to her feet, and Sylvia found herself muttering the same, pitiful pleas. God she wanted to die with some dignity, but her legs gave out beneath her and she was dragged the rest of the way by her scalp and dropped before another pair of boots. She sobbed, curling around her wounded arm and not bothering to wipe the mess of tears, snot and soot from her face. The hand in her hair forced her to face forward.

"Hello," the man before her said in Caanish, the language of the mid-westerners. He was a large, grey-haired man, with a dour, bored expression and the weatherworn face of a lifelong outdoorsman. His gaze was unavoidable, and she couldn't break eye contact with him. "Do you speak a real language?" Sylvia hesitated, confused, and he waved a hand at the man holding her hair. He began dragging her away when she found her voice.

"Yes," she said, her words cracking on the ice in her throat. "Yes!" She screamed the second time, and the grey-haired man held up a halting hand.

"I am Colonel Foucault, commander of first mountaineers, third regiment. Who are you?" With a nod of his head the hand in her hair released her, letting her fall on her butt. She had to swallow a few times before continuing.

"Sy-Sylvia Messerschmitt, sir, I—" Sylvia swallowed again. Her left leg shook so bad it made her rock back and forth. "I am... I am the... Steam Trainer, a Steam Trainer, for the Compton Electrical and Locomotive Union. I'm... a civilian sir, please, I don't want to die."

"Nobody wants to die, Sylvia Messerschmitt of the Compton Electrical and Locomotive Union," Foucault said. He gestured to the soldier behind her and, with a complicated series of hand gestures. Tears streamed down her face as the soldiers began systematically executing the prisoners. "Thank your God that you are useful to me. You will see the sun rise today." Sylvia sucked breath into her lungs, forcing herself to breathe through the tears.

"Thank you," she said. A stream of blood began moving down the hill, cutting a path through the ash. Its tributaries grew with every gunshot, thickening the stream into a river that plunged, hot and steaming, ever westward. The soldier helped Sylvia to her feet, a bit more easily this time. "Thank you."

Chapter One

Pram tangled her fingers up in the thick locks of Bennett's hair and pulled his face into her neck. He moved with little resistance to her collarbone, running his tongue over it and up the side of her neck, biting down just as he pushed inside her. She gasped, pulled his head back and kissed him hard on the mouth. For a brief moment, their breathing fell into sync with the rhythmic pumps of his hips between her legs. He braced himself against the headboard with one hand and pushed her back down against the bed with the other.

The rough callouses on his palms scratched at the smooth, brown skin of her shoulder. Bennett's hands were indelicate, strong and she relished him for his coarseness. She released her grip on his hair and lay back, letting his rough palm move down over her throat, and then down further to cup her breast. She bit her lip. He picked up speed. Sweat beaded up on both their faces despite the cool air blowing in from the tower window.

Pram could see the first traces of sunlight leaking over the eastern hills. It poured into the room in beams through the fluttering blue of the silk curtains. It highlighted the harsh, angular lines of Bennett's face, glimmered in the sweat on his skin as it ran down across his chest, and cast shadows between the taught, flexing muscles of his abdomen. His eyes were a darker shade of blue than the curtains. His hair was a lighter shade of black than the fading night outside. Pram found him incredibly dull, but he was a great way to waste a morning.

Her body shivered, approaching climax, and her legs flexed involuntarily against his sides. He moved his hands to grip behind her knees and pushed down hard, moving her feet past her head. The suddenness of the motion hurt and she gasped.

"Are you OK?" He asked, slowing down.

"Don't stop," she responded, covering his hands with hers and pulling back further. He obliged, wrapping his hands behind her back and around her shoulders and picking up the momentum. The surge took her breath away. She bit down on his shoulder, but he kept pace. His skin tasted like sweat and leather and sex and she couldn't get enough and then she came, her nails digging hard into the skin of her legs. Warm, buttery ecstasy flooded her mind, turned every nerve into a hot pinprick of light. For a moment, nothing mattered. Nothing at all.

"Did you?" Bennett asked, slowing up a bit.

"Yeah," Pram replied softly. She traced the contours of his chest muscles with a fingernail, and then pulled his lips to hers. They kissed, lips barely brushing. Teeth bit down gently, tugging. The flick of one tongue against another. His stubble on her cheek. Her nails on his back. The weight of his body, his hands tracing the curves of her skin.

"Where should I..." he asked without finishing the sentence.

"On me," she said lazily, "not in me." He kissed her again, pulled out, and stood on his knees. She looked up at him, all taut muscles glistening in the rising sunlight, and rubbed his flanks with a contented calf muscle. He stroked himself with a single hand, his eyes clenched shut until he came onto her stomach. He wiped the hot little droplets off of her with a towel before they had a chance to cool, and then flopped down onto the sheets beside her.

He smiled playfully, rubbing her side with his hand pushing his hand beneath her head. They kissed. A steam whistle howled to life in the crisp morning air outside. Pram turned away from Bennett and picked her father's black wristwatch from the bedside table.

"That was the seven o'clock to Morrissey," she said aloud, feeling the clockwork inside the watch turning over itself in her hand. "I've got to be at the platform in an hour." She groaned and let Bennett cradle her head on his shoulder. She draped an arm over him and kissed his chest, hating the sun rising in the window.

"Me too," he said, kissing the top of her head. "Somebody changed the manifest yesterday afternoon and we've got to recheck the back 80 cars before departure."

"Sounds terrible," she said, sitting up and fumbling around the dark side of the bed for a shirt.

"Yeah," he said, sitting up beside her. "But at least I don't have to get set on fire for my job." She chuckled, he had a point. Bennett summoned a hobo's flame in his right hand, filling the dark side of the room with ugly white light. Pram squinted at it, and then found her oversized, button-up pajama shirt beside Bennett's ugly, orange and blue striped boxer shorts. She stood and pulled the shirt on over her head.

"I wish I could do that," she said, pointing at the hobo's flame. "It's so convenient." Bennett laughed and dispelled it, picking up his boxers in the process.

"Yeah, and I wish I was I larger conduit, so I could a real job instead of being a maintenance monkey for fancy Steam Trainers like you," he said, grinning and leaning in for a kiss. She leaned away, smiling.

"Put some pants on," she said, "I need a shower and you've got to go." Bennett pulled on his boxers and they kissed again. "I'll see you later, OK?"

"Yeah," he said, and then he was gone.

Pram showered and got dressed, strapping her father's watch to her wrist as she moved to the window looking out over the town. The Bailey Hub was slow to rise in the morning, and she could only see the shadowy outlines of a few morning commuters shuffling back and forth to whatever drudgery the day was going to bring. She had only been here a few times before the war began, and even after the Imperium built up the Hub to handle supply missions, the townsfolk had changed very little.

Conflicts in the west were nothing new to Bailey, it had been a frontier town for hundreds of years now, captured and repatriated a hundred times before the Imperium had existed. The same tired-faced Plebes would be still be wandering across those cracked grey pavers a thousand years from now, listlessly working themselves to death in pointless ignominy. Another steam whistle pealed out its cry into the morning air, the seven-thirty to Dulles Dane Mills. Time to go.

Pram locked the door to the tower apartment behind her and turned the key in at the desk downstairs. The clerk, entirely too cheery for the early hour, smiled and had her sign out on the register.

"Thank you for staying with us ma'am," said the clerk. Pram wondered to herself if the girl couldn't blink, or just chose not to.

"Yeah, thanks," replied Pram, pulling her wallet out of her side bag and sliding a twenty across the desk. "Hey, could you have somebody run my bags over to platform 2B? Just have them drop them at the Compton E&L head office and give them my name. Pram Beazley, it's on all the bags too." The clerk nodded.

"Of course, ma'am," she said, "and thank you again for staying with Bailey Castle Tower Suites." Pram halfheartedly returned her smile and left through the refurbished castle's massive, studded-oak doors. The streets were still relatively quiet outside, and a cold mist hung low over the cobbled stone streets, still wet from the last night's rain.

The air was chilly, and it had the sort of mid-fall coldness to it that sank into the skin slowly until it got to the bone. Her uniform, a set of heavy canvas shorts and a vest over a skintight, black thermal suit that covered all but her hands and neck, provided little heat, but it was a short few blocks to the platform. Her heavy soled boots clacked loudly against the ground as she walked, and the echoing taps of her footfalls were the only noticeable sound on the quiet streets.

The few trees lining the side of the main boulevard that led to the platform had begun shedding their fall regalia, leaving whole swaths of the ground covered in formless red and gold mosaics. The wet leaves would occasionally stick to the sides of her feet every few steps, only to fall off moments later. It made her think of her train, up ahead, and the steady ticking of her father's watch.

The sound of the station grew steadily louder as she approached, a tumultuous roar of voices, clattering cars and the constant rushing bustle of foot traffic up and down the platform. The press of bodies inside the station kept it warm, despite its lack of a dedicated heating system, and Pram took a moment to stretch and shake off the cold. Her tryst with Bennett had left her sore, in a good way, though it did make stretching her legs somewhat addictive. She got warm thinking of him, despite herself.

Pram rolled her eyes at her own schoolgirl foolishness and moved through the throng of bodies toward the Compton E&L field office at platform B2. Most of the people here were military, she noticed, wishing she were taller to better see where she was going. The rest were an assorted hodgepodge of traders, regular passengers and employees of the three rail companies that were currently operating out of the Bailey Hub. Something made her shiver.

A pair of black eyes caught hers through the crowd, locked on them. The glimpse only lasted a moment. Thick, unruly black hair, a shock-white face and the sharp features of a bird or a snake. She froze, unease seeping into her stomach like oil from a broken feed line. Her hair stood on end. Then, it was over, shaken off like the odd case of déjà vu. Despite the warmth of the station, Pram found herself rubbing her arms the rest of the way to the office.

Nash leaned against one of the platform's support columns and yawned, popped his neck, and absent-mindedly thumbed through the free train schedule he had taken from a rack of pamphlets by the customs window. "Ride! With The Pride of The Imperium," said blocky typeface over the family of four smiling in front of some huge commuter engine. He could make out the outline of the White Fingers looming in the distance behind the train, and the tip of Mount Granger partially blocking out the sun behind them. The Fingers are called the Granger Pass on this side of the continent, he reminded himself, flipping over the pamphlet.

The information held little use for Nash. He had spent the last few days holed up in a dingy little apartment on the south side of Bailey, memorizing every facet of the job. Less than a week to become a perfunctory expert on Compton E&L, the rail system and every crewmate and passenger. A tall order, but the money was worth it. Now that everything was in place, all he had to do was spot his mark. By far, the most boring portion of the job. He kept himself busy watching people shuffling through the station.

Hundreds of people stood in lines to get tickets, milled about the shops or rested on the golden framework of the benches that dotted each platform in uniform rows. A family of colonists, looking on the run from the troubles out west, huddled in a grey pile of moldering travel coats. Two young children rested their heads on the father's lap. The man gazed off into the middle distance, his face covered in stubble and pulled low and slack from worry. The lot of them were fair-haired and light-eyed, likely Gunnervand immigrants. A grey-haired woman, possibly the mother, gently shook the father on the shoulder and motioned toward the platform. The peel of a whistle shrieked over the noise of the crowd, preceding the rumble of a train pulling into the station from the yard.

"Those western dogs are too ferocious for civilized interaction," said a woman behind Nash. "I've heard they refused any possibilities of a peaceful resolution to this conflict." Nash turned his back to the pillar and watched the conversation from the corner of his eye. Two plump ladies, covered from head-to-toe in the intricately woven silk fashionable in the eastern coastal cities, tittered back and forth to each other about politics behind gloved hands.

"Well I've heard that that's all just Senate politics," said the scarlet-haired second woman. Nash spotted a stain on her otherwise immaculate lace overcoat, a spot of red wine that stood out brilliantly against the garish white. It was a perfectly round dot, the size of an eyeball, just above the knee. Neither of the two noticed. "My husband says the Senate is trying to whip the plebes up into a frenzy, get them ready for an invasion of the west." The other woman scoffed into the back of her hand. She caught Nash's eye as she did so.

He winked at her, cracking half a smile and doffing the slender brim of his hat at her. She blushed, turned away and pulled at her friend's wrist. They walked a few paces away, turned back to catch a glimpse of Nash, and then quickly rushed off down the platform, giggling like idiots. He ran a hand down his unfamiliar face, marveling at the power of stolen beauty as a wry smile curled his lips. The voice of the station manager came over the intercom system, instructing all passengers boarding the eight o'clock to Cullville. The masses obeyed, moving around Nash like water past a rock.

The crowd shrunk surged and receded as the arriving passengers pushed past their replacements. This shipment had brought with it a load of soldiers wearing the white uniforms of the Imperium. Troops heading for the front line. Most of them would probably end up on the same train he was getting on, which was a shame for them. They looked young.

Nash spotted his mark standing in line at a concession booth, barely visible behind a street conjurer performing simplistic spells for a group of children. He stood stock still, the shear thrill of accomplishment freezing him in place. His mind raced through possibilities, weighing the few available options against likelihoods of success. The best option was to wait. His eyes drank up every detail of the man he was about to kill.

The man was tall, just shy of two meters, with honey-blonde hair and blue eyes. His skin had the deep, golden-brown tan of an outdoorsman, and it was stretched taut over his muscular frame. The man moved away from the concession stand, dropping the cap of a drink bottle into the performer's upturned cap. The performer didn't notice the deceit, and formed a laughing face out of wavering light to thank him. Nash's fingers twitched in anticipation.