Chapter One #

The Korsian ambassador, Levas, looks down his glasses at me. He’s not actually Korsian, I’ve never seen a real Korsian before. He’s from Rith or some other old world. But he seems a terribly loyal man. The Korsians are lucky to have him. I don’t tell him that. This is one of the rare occasions where I am the face of the battalion. Brance sits beside me. He usually lets me do the talking when we meet with Levas. Says Levas is nicer to me.

“We have our wars,” Levas says, gently, “but, as always, Korsian forces do not intend to leave Kors. None of the potentates even possess spaceworthy weapons.”

The higher-ups are always asking me about Korsian military intentions. If I can give them an answer straight from Levas, they’ll be happier.

There are legends about the people of Kors, before they disappeared behind the wall of the Treaty. Legends and rumors that tell of strange weapons, ghostly swords of vapor, terrifying soldiers fighting with no compassion. I’ve grown up hearing stories like that my whole life. Here in Koriograf there are a lot of popular shows about that kind of thing. All ridiculously made up.

“Thanks,” I say, smiling dully to conclude our meeting. I wish I could tell him that I don’t mean to be rude with these questions, they’re just things I have to ask. I want to be nice. But ambassadors are serious people.

He nods like he understands anyway. He’s an older man, maybe sixty years old to my forty. He has a red-and-green tie on over his simple military uniform. A Christmas tie. He must be Rithian after all, because I don’t think they celebrate Christmas up on Kors. He catches me looking at the tie. 

“Old traditions,” he says. “The Korsians don’t mind.”

I haven’t worn Christmas colors in a long time. Only the drab cream of my uniform. Red and green would look nice with it. 

Levas leaves, and I’m left alone with Brance, wondering at my position. I’m just a pilot, and now I have to talk to ambassadors. After twenty years of intense war at Damascene, I’m back home at Koriograf. They were trying to be kind to me, sending me back here, promoting me. I’m technically a full battalion commander now. In charge of a hundred squads of Porcelain Helmets and one of the two stonefrigates stationed here.

But I’m no commander. I just relay orders, that’s all. It’s only a technicality. There are captains under me and admirals above me who give the real orders. Brance is my equal. He’s a real commander. Gives real orders. I copy what he does, most of the time, and he knows it.

“You ever celebrate Christmas?” he asks. 

I sigh in answer and stand up. I don’t want to talk to him about the past. About my childhood, the distant, unsullied bit of my past. I don’t tell him about the last time I wore a Christmas dress. That was all back when I was good. When I was my mother’s daughter. I’m not a good person now. Not since I joined the Porcelain Helmets, and certainly not since Damascene.

I ride an automatic car, a military one, down from Base Alpha. Base Alpha is the home of the battalions stationed here in Koriograf. I watch the towers of my home city haze past the windows, dark concrete shadows that loom like mountains amid the rattle of the endless hail from the sky. Koriograf is a grand city, at least a thousand years old, with buildings like gigantic concrete pillars protruding from the sea below. Koriograf is the only city on this world of dead waves and falling hail. Koriograf is a city, a nation, a world, all in one. A single grand outpost on a dead world of water and cold hail.

The car skims low over the turbulent sea. I sit silently, listening to the hail on the roof, watching it pelt soundlessly into the sea out the window. Our moon, Kors, is up there somewhere, invisible and utterly dark. You can’t see far in the hail, but the whole city looks cold and dead. It always looks cold and dead. The real life of the city is inside the stony towers, but you’d never know it from looking. We pass other cars in the dim evening light. They glitter with bright fog lights that cut through the hail.

Flying so low to the surface of the water reminds me of days, years, spent fighting on Damascene. I piloted stonefrigates then, too. I am a good pilot. I would pour mechanized infantry, Porcelain Helmets, from the belly of my ship and they would decimate the enemy. I would maneuver to pick them up again afterward, and there would always be less. In successful warfare, you only deploy units once. You don’t need to pick them back up again unless you’re losing.

The car climbs and stops at a dock halfway up a stony behemoth of a building. There is a roof over a jutting portico of tan stone. I stand under the roof and listen to the hail shattering above me until the car pulls away. When the car is gone, I step out to the unsheltered edge of the dock. Hail hammers down around me, on me. A thousand-foot drop yawns at my feet, but I am not scared. I am a pilot. It feels criminal, somehow, to be out in this weather but to feel none of it. Like it’s not real or something. I want to feel it, to remember being here, even if it doesn’t matter. It’s the same reason I used to open the cannoneer’s windows back on Damascene. I wanted to feel the alien wind in my hair, let it scrub its fingers over my skin.

The hail stings my face, blowing hard, and I turn and go to the elevators. I ride to the two thousand and first floor, crunching a piece of hail in my mouth. I like the quiet parts of Koriograf. You only ever have to see what you want to see. The rest of the city simply—doesn’t exist. For me, Koriograf is a serene, calm place, dark and cold with the bright halls of military buildings and the cozy apartments of my home. For others, Koriograf is bright and noisy and endlessly busy.

My apartment is dim and cool, lit by orange strips of light. My mother is already asleep in her room. She didn’t know I’d be coming home today.