ACT I

SHE-WOLF



Gods of my country, heroes of the soil,

And Romulus, and Mother Vesta …

Preservest, this new champion at the least

Our fallen generation to repair …

Here where the wrong is right, the right is wrong,

Where wars abound so many, and myriad-faced

… new strife

Is stirring; neighbouring cities are in arms,

The laws that bound them snapped; and godless war

Rages through all the universe.

—Virgil, Georgics

I

Rome, Mother Earth, 7798 A.U.C

EVERY NIGHT THE SAME dream—a blast wave of atomic fire raced across the surface of a distant ice world, an inferno that would envelop the planet’s capital in a matter of minutes, transmuting sturdy buildings to slag, consuming three and a half million lives with the same dispassion as it liquidized steel and stone. But before that could happen, I had to bear witness.

Mother ran toward me as the bright firewall rose up behind her, rapidly gaining ground. Ever Stoic, her face registered no fear, only a dread urgency—there was something important she had to tell me before the fire claimed her—but I was trapped behind a wall of thick, dirty ice, entombed alive in it. In place of words, all that reached my ears was a dull, brassy drone.

Mother tore out her hairpin and used it to scratch two words into the ice, but they appeared back to front, and I couldn’t read them in time because my little brother suddenly entered the scene. Aulus’ small body was trapped in the press of stampeding citizens as they fled the city, his eyes wide with panic. Mother turned from me and rushed to aid my brother, hair flailing behind her, the tips of the tresses catching fire as the burning wind rushed over her. Arms outstretched like a dragnet, she made an instinctive but futile effort to catch Aulus and wrap him up before the thermal currents scorched them both to ash. The ice was the only thing protecting me from the unstoppable fire, yet I battered it with my fists, clawed at it until my fingernails splintered and snapped. I fought to stay, prayed to Minerva that I be consumed with Mother and Aulus, disintegrated by heat and light.

* * *

I WOKE IN A fevered state, burning up, heart racing, breathing rapid and shallow. The silk sheet was drenched in sweat, clinging to my body like a hungry ghost. The urge to sit up and grasp for a lungful of air was strong, but instead, I kicked the sheet off the end of the bed and lay there, tears stinging my eyes, forcing my lungs to take the slowest, deepest possible breaths.

A clear golden light bathed the high ceiling of my bedchamber, the kind that follows a summer dawn. The gilded cornices that skirted the ceiling’s edges bore seventy-one cracks of varying lengths, and I slowly counted each one in turn until I could breathe normally and all that remained was a residual choleric anger—the outrage that any human being must experience at witnessing the murder of loved ones. The sharpest sword dulls with repeated use, but the dream never lost its cruel edge. My ears still rang with the sound of Mother’s voice trying to penetrate the wall of ice between us. No instrument could replicate the unsettling drone that poured from her mouth. The closest analogy I could come up with (and in the aftermath of the dream each morning, I had plenty of time to turn things like this around in my mind) was the sound of a living beehive submerged in water.

I sat up on the hard edge of my bed, ignoring aching muscles and the patchwork of bruises that peppered my body, still tender from my last match. My cameo lay on the bedside table, projecting a holographic scene into the air on endless loop—the sky was blue, a field of golden wheat blew back and forth in the wind behind them. Mother was playing with Aulus out front of our country villa on the Amalfi Coast, throwing a ball for him to catch. Her hair was tossed gently this way and that by the summer wind. It was the same as mine, that hair. Jet-black and dead straight with one curvy bone-white shock that originated in the roots above the right forehead and ran all the way down like a skinny waterfall tumbling over a shiny onyx pillar. My brother was laughing. Some of his teeth were missing. He was nine years old. I’d taken the video myself the day before they left on what was supposed to be just another one of my mother’s research trips. Aulus was on holidays and had bothered Mother for weeks to take him with her to Olympus Decimus until she finally caved in and agreed. I was seventeen years old, busy with my final year of studies at the Academy, and had no intention of tagging along as a glorified babysitter. So I was sleeping soundly in my apartment in Rome when, fifty thousand light-years away, the talon fighters of House Sertorian’s attack fleet peppered the ice world with their bombs.

Seven hundred and fourteen days had passed since. For almost two years their deaths had gone unavenged, their spirits tossing and turning in Hades’ dark caverns.

Slowly rising from the bed, I allowed gravity to ground me, feeling my weight sink to my feet, finding each sore muscle on its journey, letting the pain signals pass over me. On day seven hundred and fifteen, when dawn stretched out her rose-red fingers, I would journey down Via Appia with my team, cheered on by the city before boarding a carrier that would transport me to Olympus Decimus to join in the Ludi Romani, the emperor’s great gladiatorial games. There, on the ice world where Mother and Aulus had been killed, I’d either suffer their fate and be killed or survive and triumph, with the men responsible for the bombing dead and bloody at my feet. Then Mother and Aulus would be at rest and the dream of fire would depart, leaving me to the embrace of a cool and silent sleep.

Peeling off my nightdress, I hurriedly threw on a loose-fitting training outfit and snapped my armilla over my forearm. My armilla—a long utility bracelet bordered with gold piping and inset with a small monitor, input pad, shield, and holographic projector eye—was thin and comfortable, like a second skin.

I strode from my bedchamber, down the hall toward the center of my apartment, past the shrine surrounded with holographic busts of my ancestors, until I reached the atrium, where the open-roofed courtyard provided the most available vertical space. Tapping the panel on my armilla, I projected research nodes into the air about me. A dozen screens presented notes and files, media streams from all corners of the empire, studies in history, tactics, law, ancient and modern arms and armor—my research. A sharp turn of the wrist unhitched the screens from the device, leaving them hanging in space. My hands swung through the air, managing my information like a conductor leading an orchestra. First I scanned the morning news on the vox populi forum. I had keyword alerts set up, but you couldn’t anticipate every eventuality. My mother had taught me self-reliance and critical thinking—“Never trust technology to cover every base, Accala. Always make the extra effort to bring your brain into the equation.”

I brought the day’s arena schedule to the fore and read it again. The final trial rounds were being fought in the morning. There were two places out of fifty-six still undecided. Vacancies in the teams of House Calpurnian and Flavian. It would all be decided before noon, after which the final team complements would be announced in full. In the afternoon there’d be speeches (the galactic audience would be watching eagerly via the vox populi forum from the most distant corners of the empire) followed by the contestants’ private dinner. The speeches would be the most unbearable part of the day. The game editor would release some clues about the obstacles and challenges in the coming events, then senators and committee officials would follow with dreary speeches designed to remind the empire of their value and importance. Finally, each gladiator would occupy the podium for a few seconds and state his or her hopes and reason for fighting. I loathed public speaking, but there was no way out of it; the audience demanded a predeparture speech from the gladiators. It added spice to the games, gave the audience a chance to decide whom to back, and aided a vast network of bookmakers in the sharpening of their odds. So I’d be brief. I’d speak of Viridian honor, of avenging the souls of our fighters and colonists who died at Sertorian hands. I’d thank Marcus for training me, be conciliatory to my fellow Golden Wolves who’d missed out on a place, and I’d bite my tongue no matter how much the Sertorian contestants or the withered chauvinists of the Galactic Committee for Combative Sports riled me. I wouldn’t mention my personal goals and grievances, no ammunition to give anyone cause to disqualify me.

Switching back to the vox populi forum, I scrolled the latest news items. Locally the Festivities of Minerva on Mother Earth were already coming to a close in the southern hemisphere. There was coverage of our own dawn service at Nemorensis. A special report detailed a new Sauromatae revolt on their worlds near the galactic rim—rioting on the streets, a magistrate from House Arrian killed in an explosion, but the local legion already in the process of restoring order. Five thousand and one already dead. One Roman magistrate and five thousand blue-scaled Sauromatae, most of them extended family members of the rebels who were executed as both punishment and deterrent. No surprise. That was how barbarian uprisings usually played out.

The main news, as expected, was about the coming Festival of Jupiter, the most important and extravagant holiday of the year, and its games, the Ludi Romani, which were always the most eagerly awaited and most hotly contested. Long ago we’d learned that the key to sustaining a galactic empire lay in delivering a never-ending serving of bread and circuses. Emperors and politicians talked about honor and tradition, but all the masses wanted was to be fed, employed, and entertained in peace. Then the whole system ticked over. As one holiday festival ended, you had to wait only a week or two before the next one started up.

Scanning through the multiple streams of media coverage, I listened to brief snatches of discussion on strengths and weaknesses of the gladiators, the rules, and various contests that might be brought into play, but it was all speculation until the emperor’s officials announced the nature of the course. And the prize. They couldn’t stop talking about it, the greatest prize ever offered in the empire’s long history.

Satisfied, I tapped the panel on my armilla to shut down the information nodes. Once the sun set, I’d be home free, on track to depart the galactic capital with nothing but the tournament to focus on. Until then though, my father still had the time and the means to try and derail me. He’d been suspiciously silent on the topic of the coming tournament, refusing to discuss the matter or acknowledge my part in it, and so I’d set aside the whole day to manage any potential disaster that might rear its head. I’d sacrificed everything to secure my place in the coming games, overcome every hurdle put in my path. Nothing was going to stop me from fighting in the Ludi Romani. That was my fate. It was set in stone.

I headed to my training area. My green steel trunk, packed with armor, auxiliary weapons, warm clothes, and cold-weather survival equipment, was waiting for me by the door, ready to be shipped. Written on the side in neon yellow was A. VIRIDI—an abbreviation of my name. Father gave me the trunk for my eighteenth birthday, two months after Mother and Aulus were killed. He hoped it would carry my belongings to the home of my future husband, but I had no mind to play the part of a broodmare and make noble babies with an influential senator. Happily, though much to my father’s consternation, when the news of my first fight in the arena broke, the suitors who’d been lining up to pay me court dried up like a drought-plagued riverbed.

My training area had once been the triclinium, the living area where guests could recline on comfortable couches, but it contained no divans, couches, daybeds, or hand-carved crystal side tables bearing expensive, exotic fruits. Viridians are practical, functional people by nature. We do not seek comfort or decoration in our rooms, but even so, my large chambers were decidedly spartan compared to the others in the family compound. A plain wood table held two bowls—one containing olives, the other honeyed figs—a pitcher of watered-down wine, and the sling case that held my combat discus, sharp-edged Orbis—only the bare essentials required to sleep, eat, and train.

I ran through my calisthenics without arms or armor, visualizing my enemies. Sidestep the incoming javelin thrust, kick the opponent’s knee, lock and disable the weapon arm. A finger strike to paralyze the trapezius and finish with a sharp folding elbow technique to the back of the neck to rupture the medulla oblongata and bring on heart and lung failure. Next, catch a steel whip on my forearm and counter with a high kick to the throat to crush the larynx, followed with a scissor-leg takedown.

* * *

AN HOUR PASSED BEFORE I was satisfied that I could move freely from my center of gravity without any residual tension to obstruct strength or speed. I bathed, dressed in my stola—white robes with a twin trim of gold and emerald green, a gold embroidered wolf on the breast marking me as a member of House Viridian—and went to my ancestral shrine to make offerings to Minerva so that she would pour her blessings and favor upon me.

Before I could start my initial libation, an incoming news alert flashed on my armilla’s screen accompanied by a sinking feeling in my stomach. A newly posted story revealed that two Sertorian gladiators had died overnight, one from a sudden illness, the other murdered by an obsessive fan, leaving the Blood Hawks with two vacant slots that had to be filled by the end of the day to make up the standard team of eight. Additional trials had been hastily arranged by the committee as the rules stated that all the slots needed to be filled before the teams departed for the arena world. My hands shook, fingers fumbling to bring up the list of Sertorian competitors. Titus Malleus and Gorgona were the sudden fatalities. I mouthed a quick thanks to Minerva that my targets had not been removed from the field. Just the same, it didn’t add up. Those gladiators were at the top of their game, two of the best, their health and safety carefully managed by a team of physicians and attendants. The report went on to say that the Sertorians were desperate to find suitable replacements and had even been considering gladiators from allied houses. A quick check of the Golden Wolves team list showed my name still there, right after our team leader and trainer. The galactic betting pools confirmed that the Blood Hawks were substantially weakened. No longer considered the outright favorite, they were now rated third to last. No bad news at all! A weakened Sertorian team would make my job all the easier.

Kneeling, I looked up past my ancestors to the alabaster statue of Minerva that crowned the small shrine. Beside me, in a sapphire bowl that rested on a tripod, were dozens of small figurines, each the size of my thumb’s tip and formed in the shape of a bull. For each figurine I deposited in the shrine’s incinerator, an instantaneous signal would transmit to one of the empire’s many temple worlds, ordering that a dozen live bulls be slaughtered on my behalf and burned as an offering in the name of my chosen deity. To ensure an auspicious day and a victorious tournament, I planned on dropping in every last one of them, but just as I gathered up the first handful, a soft chime sounded, giving me a second’s notice before the doors of my chamber slid open and Bulla, my bronze-skinned Taurii body slave, came barreling in on large hoofed feet. She snorted and pulled herself up, stamping her right hoof on the ground. Her pierced cowlike ears pricked up with excitement. “Lady Accala! Domina! You awake? Domina, you awake?”

Gods, but Bulla could be intimidating when she moved at speed—an eight-foot mountain of muscle in a green tent dress, cinched at her broad waist by a thick belt with an iron buckle. Bulla’s fine fawn-colored fur was combed over the jagged battle scars that covered her body in a futile attempt to mask them and soften her appearance, but there were so many cicatricial scores running against the natural line of fur, some like white worms, others purple and swollen with scar tissue, that it only made her look more formidable. She caught me by surprise; I thought she might have been my father come for a showdown over the tournament, and I accidentally dropped the handful of figurines, sending them scattering across the floor.

“No. As you can see, I fell asleep at the altar,” I said in an irritated voice.

“Oh. Then you wake up. Wake up. You must.” Taurii do sleep on their feet, and sarcasm and sharpness of thought are not a strong point of the species. Bulla had been my mother’s slave and served first as a matron then as pedagogue to my brother, seeing him safely to and from school. After they died, Bulla shared her grief by lowing outside my room night after night. That didn’t comfort me at all of course, but she was fiercely loyal to my mother and had nursed both my little brother and me. I could hardly allow Father to send her to the slave markets when she found herself without a position.

“I’m awake now,” I said. “What is it?”

“A messenger come from the Colosseum. From the Colosseum. They turn him away at the gate but I hear him call out your name, domina. I push the guards away and ask him what he want. What do you want I say?”

“That’s strange. Why would they bother to send someone in person?”

“The man says your lanista, Marcus, he try to send you message after message, but they all blocked.”

My armilla still showed nothing out of the ordinary. I ran a quick diagnostic and discovered that some incoming frequencies were being weakened to the point that my armilla couldn’t pick them up—a customized signal jam. A quick power boost to the armilla’s receiver, and just like magic the screen flickered, and communicats and alerts came pouring in, accompanied by warning alarms. Seven messages from Marcus alone, and he’d never written me one before that day. They all said the same thing.

Come quickly. The committee is moving to scratch you from the tournament. I’ll do what I can.

I quickly flicked to the list of confirmed Ludi Romani contestants I’d checked only moments before. With the signal block removed, it contained one vital alteration. My name, Accala Viridius Camilla, had a line running right through it. I’d been scratched. The match to find my replacement had already been held that morning, and my second cousin on my father’s side, Darius Viridius Strabo, had been confirmed.

My head felt light and dizzy, like someone had taken my feet and spun me upside down inside my own body, and I leaned back against the wall to stop from falling. This was impossible news. The Golden Wolves needed me. I had three more wins than Darius and seventeen unbroken victories in the galactic league. I was a crowd favorite and the Viridian team’s best shot at victory.

It was Father’s doing. It had to be. As an unmarried woman, I was still subject to his will. He was trying to sabotage all my hard work, still trying to force me into a mold of his making. How would he have done it? Call in a favor or two with the senators who served on the committee and order the security staff to jam certain incoming transmissions of my armilla. I was outraged, partly at his sneak attack—I’d always considered him too noble to do anything other than confront me directly—and partly at my own ineptitude—how could I not have seen it coming? So focused on a potential attack that it never occurred to me that the fight was already over and I’d lost.

My hands tightened into fists, so tight that my flat nails bit painfully into the flesh of my palms. The pain helped focus my thoughts. There were still trials under way at the Colosseum. The committee would be there. I could plead my case, try to get the judgment against me overturned. More important, Marcus would be there. He’d know how to turn things around. With his help I could fix this.

“Is Father still in the compound?” I demanded as I rushed to my dressing room.

“He left before the sun rise up,” Bulla said, thumping along behind me. “Off to the Senate house to talk. To talk at the Senate.”

“Then quick, fetch my fighting clothes, help me dress.”

“You already dressed, domina.”

I threw off my stola. “Fighting clothes first, then robes. You know what I mean.”

“You going to fight, domina?” Bulla asked, gathering up the robes as she followed after me.

“You’re damn right I am.”

“That not going to make your father happy. Not happy at all.”

“His happiness is just about the farthest thing from my mind right now.”

“Domina, do not let your father know that Bulla was the one to tell you,” she said as we entered the dressing room. “Not Bulla.”

“You have nothing to fear from him.”

“I fear he will send me to the slave markets. The slave markets or worse.”

Bulla and I had something in common. We were both subject to my father’s will. He could legally kill us both if he wished, though with me he’d have to show reasonable cause, not that that would be a problem. A noble-born woman entering the arena. In the eyes of any magistrate, I’d already given him more than enough. “Nonsense. He’d have me to deal with if he did that.” I pulled back my thick black hair and wrapped it into a knot at the base of my neck while Bulla hurriedly laid out my garments.

A formfitting base layer of fine, flexible alloys over which I pulled cotton trousers and a short silk tunic. Next my armored running shoes. Last of all I rewrapped my stola. And then I was up, striding through the training area, grabbing my weapon case, slinging it over my shoulder as I headed for the balcony.

“Breakfast!” Bulla protested. “You must eat.”

“Later.”

Before I could get past her, three thick, blunt fingers closed about my arm in a stonelike grip.

“Humans tire and die easy,” Bulla said, “and you are only a calf of nineteen summers. Don’t tire and die. Eat.”

Bulla was right. Food was fuel. Snatching up some honeyed figs from a bowl on the table, I stuffed them into my mouth.

“What you do when you see the enemy?” Bulla asked.

“I spear them on my horns. I pummel them with my hooves.”

She nodded, satisfied that I remembered her Taurii maxims, and released me.

“Make sure you know who friend and who enemy before you charge,” she called out after me. “Except with Sertorians. With them you kill first. Kill first, ask questions later.”

II

OUT ONTO THE BALCONY, past my clusters of miniature fruit trees, I stepped right up to the railing and in between two parallel bars. The bars ran back toward my apartment for a length of four feet before curving down to terminate in the balcony floor. The hot summer wind buffeted me as I gripped the bars on either side, thumbing the small built-in disc controls. At once my aer chariot broke away from the structure of the balcony and glided out over the Wolf’s Den, House Viridian’s family compound on the Aventine.

The Den was home. I was born and raised there, schooled in Viridian history, fed lists of Viridian virtues, surrounded by Viridian cousins so that when I reached eleven years of age and entered junior school with the children of the other noble houses, there should be no doubt in my mind that the greatest gift Fortune could bestow upon a newborn was that it should come into the world from the womb of a woman who had married into House Viridian.

We had been taught that Viridians traced their genetic origins to the sons and daughters of Remus and Numa—honest and hardworking, rising from simple stock to achieve a nobility based on honor and tradition, renowned for our skills in strategy and our logistics expertise. As such, we had always occupied the Aventine. Our allies, House Calpurnian and House Flavian, held the Esquiline and Caelian Hills. The Calpurnians were skilled agriculturists with a long history of seeding barren planets with carpets of oxygen-rich greenery, while the Flavians were experts in the design of faster-than-light engine technology and communication platforms, connecting the citizens of the empire as she continued her eternal expansion. Together, we three houses were formally known as the Caninine Alliance.

Steering the chariot away from the plaza and parade ground (no point announcing my presence to the guards and soldiers), I shot low over the roofs of the stacked, terraced buildings that housed my extended family. Great flags bearing the emblem of the golden wolf flapped in the morning breeze atop the barracks hall. The compound’s armored walls, decorated in faded gold and malachite green, wore cracks like old cowhide. Its ancient structures might be worn and crumbling, but the Den, like the hill fortresses of the neighboring houses, was considered a sacred beacon—a center from which a house’s power radiated outward, managing its galactic province, territories, legions, assets, and possessions. Tradition dictated that each of the eight houses should possess one of the seven sacred hills upon which Rome was founded. The obvious problem of sharing seven hills among eight houses was pragmatically and symbolically solved by the emperor and his family—encompassing the other hills by classifying their “hill” as Mother Earth herself. The emperor’s house, the current being House Numerian, took on the honorific Sons of Romulus, the hero who founded Rome city after slaying his brother Remus in a fight over whose village had bigger walls.

Activating the homemade frequency decoder on my armilla, I dropped below the sensors of the western guard tower and slipped over the boundary wall. The decoder flashed to indicate that it had completed its job a split second before I passed right through the yellow-tinged security dome, thankfully without suffering disintegration.

I shot past the small balconies of administrators and military officers who lived in the crowded apartment blocks below the fortress, opened up the throttle, and pulled clear of the Aventine, the wind whipping my robes about as I met with the aerway and vanished into the rush of morning traffic, dodging in and out of flying chariots, palanquins, and transport convoys.

Eternal Rome spread out before me, gleaming in the light of the morning sun. Perpetually pristine—white marble temples, majestic porphyry towers, and haughty civic buildings of shining granite, architecture infused with vertical light-filled channels that lent the city a celestial glow. She was breathtaking. The noise and bustle of the traffic dropped away when you beheld her magnificence. The capital of Mother Earth, which was in turn capital of the imperial province of Terra Firma. Jewel of the provinces, the wellspring of civilization, the axial city upon which the entire galaxy turned. Honor, justice, loyalty, imperium, the Pax Romana, the Senate and the people, the Twelve Tables of Roman Law—these were the virtues and institutions that made Rome great. That was the way we were taught to think of the city, the way her solemn beauty reflected those ideals, but the last two years had taught me to look past the surface of things. I’d learned that the real Rome, devoid of honor and justice, lay behind the scenes, where old wounds festered. Three hundred families governed the empire. Forty-nine families led by consuls ruled over the three hundred. Seven families led by proconsuls ruled over the forty-nine, and one emperor and his family ruled over all. Like unruly children in the class of a strict tutor, the representatives of the great houses of the city feigned amity and cooperation as they carried out the dirty business of running the empire. Feuds between families, some millennia old, played out in assassinations, espionage, and double-dealing, but none of it was ever publicly acknowledged; it all stayed hidden beneath the façade of civilization. On the surface everything was peacefully perfect. You’d never have known that a civil war was raging, threatening to tear the empire apart.

* * *

THE CIVIL WAR STARTED the moment House Sertorian launched their unprovoked attack on Olympus Decimus, but a potential conflict had been brewing for a long time before that. Two decades earlier the Sertorians began making a long play to take a step up in society and become one of the eight great ruling houses. They even bought up property in the Carinae, the fashionable district at the base of the Esquiline, to be near one of the sacred hills, but internal power disputes and factional fighting prevented them from rising very far; tolerance and cooperation were not natural Sertorian traits. Then the charismatic Aquilinus Sertorius Macula came to power. Aquilinus not only united his house, he gave them the essential ingredients they had lacked in their quest for upward mobility: roots and a connection to the ancient past.

He reminded his people that, as the Viridians looked to Remus and Numa, House Sertorian could trace their genetic lineage to the ancient emperor Caligula. Although it was commonly understood that Caligula was completely insane, as well as demonically creative when it came to indulging his sadism, the Sertorians weren’t dissuaded in the slightest from adopting him as their ancestor and guiding influence. Aquilinus argued that what others called madness and cruel excess in ancient emperors could not be seen as sinful or blameworthy. He didn’t believe in the gods but he was of the opinion that emperors were a close equivalent, the highest point of human achievement. So a superior man’s passions could not be understood or contextualized by mere mortals. He argued that Caligula’s excesses should be embraced as an essential component of Roman character and emulated by those of the Sertorian nobility. To concretize this, Aquilinus developed a manifesto of genetic superiority, a path that he promised would lead to a Sertorian-led empire, a shared vision all Sertorians found very appealing. His manifesto united the factions of his house like nothing before, and within a few years they were powerful, influential, and wealthy beyond belief, exploring every avenue for profit in the most ruthless and backhanded ways. They were just waiting for their chance to swoop on a weakness, and ironically it was my own house, which sought to deter them more than any other, that gave them the means to elevation.

It came about when the old emperor Julius Heliogabalus Caesar died, his mind and body crippled by millennia of inbreeding that even radical gene therapy couldn’t correct. Heliogabalus’ madness reached its zenith with the decision to memorialize himself and each prior Julian emperor going back to Julius Caesar by sculpting the planets of a distant solar system into a series of monumental busts—which turned out to be not so easy, as some of them were gas giants—leaving the imperial treasury’s coffers nearly drained. My uncle, the Viridian proconsul Quintus Viridius Severus, led a contingent of houses seeking to reestablish a republic in which the elected representatives of the Senate ruled the empire in place of a single dictator. Unfortunately, House Numerian, famous for its powerful warriors and land barons, chose to reestablish the existing model, and our house was left in the lurch, having backed the wrong horse.

The Sertorian leader went out of his way to make a strong impression on the new emperor, promoting his house’s mastery of finance and commerce, and donating vast sums of money to fill the empire’s coffers. The result was their elevation to the Council of Great Houses, commonly known as the Eight, and possession of the Palatine Hill, right opposite us, on the other side of the Circus Maximus, a position of honor, traditionally owned by the wealthiest house after the emperor’s. Aquilinus became a proconsul and was granted a province that they named Aeria Sertorius. He wasted no time introducing corruption into areas of commerce no one had previously thought to exploit and using the proceeds to shower the mob with festivals to increase House Sertorian’s popularity.

Soaring high above the River Tiber, I passed the Palladium—the atmosphere-scraping statue of Minerva in full armor with her shield raised, lightning spear ready to cast, the great guardian of the city wreathed and decorated to celebrate her festival.

A niggling voice at the back of my mind told me to stop into the temple at the base of the statue and make a sacrifice. I’d missed my chance back at the apartment when Bulla surprised me. But no, Minerva would have to wait. I simply didn’t have the time. Roman life was set to a strict calendar of festivals. The Festival of Minerva was drawing to a close, and tomorrow the teams for the Festival of Jupiter’s games would depart. My life would be over if I couldn’t get back on the team today. How could I live with myself if I stopped to honor Minerva and in doing so missed a vital window to turn things around?

The aerway I was on ran on a counterclockwise route around the outer edge of the city, a longer route but normally quicker unless it was a busy day, and now that the news of the new rounds at the Colosseum had been released, I could already see the traffic starting to bank up, so I prayed for Minerva’s help and switched up two lanes to Via Cordia, which would take me right into the heart of the old city.

The downside of my new route, though, was that I had to double back a little, passing the eastern side of the Palatine. It took me right past the imposing ruby-and-onyx compound of House Sertorian. Great black flags whipped about in the wind—the emblem of the crimson hawk at their center, wings and claws outstretched in the moment before it snatched up its prey. The building had a circular base and interlocking layers of smooth, curving arcs that rose up and terminated in sharp points. It was supposed to symbolize the hawk’s talons rising up from a drop of divine blood, but to me it best resembled a bruised and bleeding artichoke.

* * *

SHORTLY AFTER HOUSE SERTORIAN joined the Eight and had a powerful voice in the Senate, they started questioning the precise location of the traditional boundary between their new province and ours which neighbored it, insisting we were in possession of a couple of thousand light-years of space that was rightfully theirs, specifically the ice world Olympus Decimus. The world had only one major asset—its ionosphere was filled with supercharged particles that accelerated the speed of transmission signals passing through it. It was a valuable communication hub, but even so, not important enough to go to war over. Everyone was shocked when Aquilinus sent ships into Viridian space, bombed our settlement on Olympus Decimus, and laid claim to the world for House Sertorian.

Our side protested to the Senate immediately (my uncle Quintus had served in the legions with Aquilinus and hated the man with a passion) and began to mobilize to retaliate, but before a ruling could be made, Aquilinus ordered thirty-six simultaneous bombing strikes on key Viridian outposts spread across the border of the contested space. His ruthlessness impressed houses Tullian and Ovidian, and they allied themselves to the Sertorians. Turning their backs on their gods, sacrificing worship of Mithras and Diana in order to follow Proconsul Aquilinus, they joined what became known as the Talonite Axis, a coalition of self-serving greed and ambition that threatened all the ideals that made Rome great.

Aquilinus had judged his combined fleet powerful enough to eliminate our defenses in a single, coordinated assault, but in typical Sertorian fashion, he overestimated his strength and underestimated ours. Uncle Quintus commanded our legions with those of our three allied houses in a counterattack that repelled the Sertorians and secured most of our territory, though not Olympus Decimus. He showed them that Viridians are tough, resourceful. We fight to the end; we don’t surrender.

By the end of the first year of fighting, we had the Sertorians on the back foot and were close to total victory, but then Proconsul Aquilinus, as if by some minor miracle, managed to convince one of our allies to abandon us and take up with his axis. The defection of House Arrian was a shock no one saw coming. Arms manufacturer and creator of the force field technology vital to the running of the empire, House Arrian was an ally we couldn’t do without. The tide turned, from four houses to three in our favor to four to three against.

* * *

PASSING BY THE PALATINE brought me bad luck because when I was right over it, the traffic came to a standstill. The city was gripped with festival fever, and gladiator fans were out in force, clogging the aerway. The streets below were no better, bustling with Sertorians heading in on foot to see the final shake-up of the tournament teams before tomorrow’s parade. The clusters of buildings that streamed down from the Palatine were painted with strikingly luminous Ichthyophagi vermilion, a color most people had the good taste to use sparingly, due to the vast numbers of sentient barbarians who had to be killed to produce it, but the Sertorians had laid it on thick, and the streets of the Palatine looked like running sores.

If only I had a bomb of my own that I could drop right now without any repercussions. I’d wipe out the Sertorians and their ugly architecture. It’d even be worth destroying the entire Palatine just to be rid of them once and for all, but that could never be anything more than a fantasy. No Roman could overtly attack another citizen in Rome without violating the ancient and sacred peace of the city and facing execution.

In the distance I could see the sacred hills occupied by our enemies. As our Caninine Alliance occupied three of Rome’s seven hills, the Sertorians and their allies held the remaining four—the Tullians, shipbuilders who held the contract to engineer the imperial fleet, on the Quirinal Hill; the Ovidians, renowned for their hunting prowess, possessed the Capitoline Hill; and the Arrians, who occupied the Viminal.

* * *

UNDER THE ASSAULT OF superior numbers, the Viridian border worlds of Pontus Primus, Lupus Adamas, and Australis Valere all fell quickly and were occupied. The Sertorians even cleaned up the fallout from the bombing of Olympus Decimus and built a new city—Avis Accipitridae—setting up their own communication network in our province. After a year facing defeat after defeat, House Viridian was cash-strapped and underresourced, close to defeat. Just when it seemed there was no hope, the Sertorians made a strategic blunder, and everything changed.

The imperial province Terra Firma encompassed the tens of thousands of light-years of space around Mother Earth and the galactic center—a buffer zone to protect and preserve the cradle of civilization, the hub of the empire. On taking office, proconsuls had to swear to preserve the city of Rome and the sacred boundaries of Terra Firma province.

When the forty-second Sertorian fleet drove the sixteenth Viridian (a combined force formed with House Calpurnian) across the border into Terra Firma, Caesar Numerius Valentinius felt that both houses had overstepped the mark and needed to be reminded who was in charge. Reaching out through his personal Praetorian fleet comprising three hundred ultimare-class dreadnoughts, the emperor annihilated them all. Forty thousand Sertorian and Viridian troops and eight deceres-class war carriers wiped out in less than an hour. That slap on the wrist cost us more dearly than the Sertorians, but it ensured that the proconsuls of both houses paid attention when the emperor declared an armistice. Any house that broke the emperor’s peace would face decimation and demotion—the execution of ten percent of their house’s total population and exile to the galactic frontier. The emperor also decided upon an ingenious solution to resolve the war once and for all.

* * *

I SPAT OVER THE side of my chariot to try to ward off the bad luck, hit the throttle again, and started zigzagging in and out of the stationary vehicles to screams of abuse and blaring sirens until there was no room left to maneuver. Using my decoder, I broke through the force fields that demarcated the lanes and rushed into the open air. I’d be pursued and fined by the road safety authority, but I couldn’t worry about that. With no traffic to obstruct my path, accompanied by blaring warning sirens the whole way, it was only a matter of minutes before the Colosseum complex came into view.

The ancient arena was surrounded by four circular towers that housed the great training schools of the empire, rising up like horns about the head of a massive beast. Mine was the biggest and the best, the northern tower where the best gladiators of the capital trained—the Ludus Magnus.

Swarms of people who were unable to get a seat were gathered out front watching huge holographic projections of the tryouts taking place inside. I came in over the crowd, passing through a giant hologram of fighting gladiators.

“There! Lupa She-Wolf! Accala!” The people below were calling out, pointing at me. “Take your place back, She-Wolf! Don’t let them cheat you!”

Before I entered the arena for the first time, my trainer, Marcus, gave me the name Lupa She-Wolf—the noble Viridian lady turned savage fighter.

“I’d prefer Minerva—the bringer of justice,” I told him.

“It’ll be Lupa; it’s more theatrical. Besides, you’re named Accala for the she-wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus. It suits you.”

This did not please me, but Marcus knew what he was doing—the name had made me a hit with gladiator fans.

The air was thick with black media spherae—floating cameras marked with each house’s news station—and I had to navigate around them to land my chariot in a clear space behind the barricade to the athletes’ entrance. The moment I hit the ground, it was like I’d kicked over an anthill. Swarms of fans pressed against the barricade, calling out for autographs, yelling support. Some Sertorians in the crowd hurled obscenities at me, but I’d heard much worse in my time in the arena. Buoyed up by the crowd’s enthusiasm, I strode confidently into the Ludus Magnus. Having the audience on side meant everything to a gladiator. An eight-foot Tullian barred my way. He’d undergone a treatment to make the skin cling to his bones, giving him the appearance of a human skeleton. I knew him by name—Charon Sextus. Underworld-themed names were popular. I stared up at him and growled, daring him to make the first move. When he didn’t, I walked right at him, but he wasn’t as stupid as he looked and stepped aside at the last moment. I was tempted to punish him for delaying me, but this man was a second-rater, not worthy of my anger.

I passed the statues of the Twelve that lined the athletes’ entrance hall—the greatest gladiators of all time. Every competitor dreamed of approaching their score, the more delusional of actually winning enough matches and glory to find themselves included among that elite group. Caladus, Saturnilos, Scylax, Julius Ovidius, Orosius, Hermes, Toxaris, Varus, Cerberus, Gnaeus Arrius Diocles, Heracles, and Achillia—the only female grand champion. But immortal glory wasn’t of interest to me. Justice, bloody and righteous, was my goal, and I would not be denied it.



Copyright © 2016 by Claudia Christian and Morgan Grant Buchanan