the side of his heart, I make him a carcass. He dies wide-eyed and young and he floats there, upright till I put my foot on his chest so I can pull my blade out. We drift away from each other. Little droplets of blood dancing off my blade in the zero gravity.
Then the gravity generators reboot and my feet clomp to the floor. The blood splatters over them.
His body flops to the ground. Light floods in behind me from the tunnel shaft. I pull myself away from the dead man and peer up into the tunnel to see a shuttle ripping in out of space. More follow. A whole cavalcade of assault craft led by Victra. RipWings chase them, but mounted guns on the back of the assault craft spray high-energy fist-sized rounds at them. Shredding the ripWings. More will come. Hundreds more. We must move fast. Speed and aggression our only advantage here.
Victra’s transport slows dramatically in the tunnel beyond my level, just above the clawDrill.
Valkyrie pour out to join me. More transports unload on levels above. Holiday and several Reds with
battle armor move with the Obsidians, carrying breaching equipment across the airless room toward the bulkhead door that seals us off from the rest of the ship. They slam the thermal drill onto the metal. It begins glowing red. They deploy a pulseBubble over the metal hatch so that when we breach, we don’t activate more bulkheads.
“Breach green in fifteen,” Holiday says.
Victra stands to the side listening to enemy chatter. “Response teams inbound. More than two thousand mixed units.” She’s also patched to the strategic command on Orion’s ship, so she can gather battle data from the huge sensor arrays on the flagship. Looks like Roque launched more than fifteen thousand men at us in his leechCraft. Most will be in the Pax by now. Burrowed through to find me. Silly bastards. Roque gambled big, bet wrong. And I’ve just brought three thousand crazed Obsidian berserkers to a mostly empty warship.
The Poet is going to be pissed.
“Ten,” Holiday says.
“Valkyrie, on me,” I boom, lifting my hands in a triangle formation.
The hundred Obsidians step over the debris of the commissary and gather behind me, just as we trained them to do on the journey from Jupiter. Sefi’s on my left hip, Victra’s on my right and Holiday behind. The superheated metal door sags. The Reds and Grays back away. All along the tunnel on the ten levels I carved through, teams like this will be preparing to breach just like us. Two of the other clawDrills hit home. Two thousand Obsidians are breaching there as well. Grays, Reds, and a scattering of sympathizer Golds will lead them against the security forces who take trams and gravLifts to ferry themselves to the new battlefront inside the ship.
This is going to be a firestorm. Close quarters combat. Smoke. Screams. The worst of war.
“Full power to shields,” I say in Nagal, facing the Valkyrie. They ripple iridescent as shields play over their armor. “Kill anything with a weapon. Harm nothing without one. Doesn’t matter the Color.
Remember our target. Clear me a path. Hyrg la, Ragnar!”
“Hyrg la, Ragnar!” they roar, beating their chests, embracing the madness of war. Most will have taken their beserker fungus in the shuttlecraft. They’ll feel no pain. They move foot-to-foot, eager for the succor of battle. Victra vibrates next to me. I remember sitting with her in Mickey’s lab as she told me how she loves the smell of battle. The old sweat in the gloves. The oil on the guns. The pulled muscles and shaking hands afterward. It’s the honesty of it, I realize. That’s what she loves. Battle never lies.
“Victra, stay at my side,” I say. “Pair up for the Hydra if we encounter Golds.”
“Njar la tagag…” Sefi says from behind me.
“…syn tjr rjyka!”
“There is no pain. Only joy,” they chant, deep in the embrace of the god’s bread. Sefi begins the war bellow. Her voice higher than Ragnar ’s. Her two wing-sisters join her. Then their wing-sisters, until dozens fill the com with their song, giving me a sense of grandeur as my mind tells my body to flee. This is why the Obsidians chant. Not to sow terror. But to feel brave, to feel kinship, instead of isolation and fear.
Sweat drips down my spine.
Fear is not real.
Holiday deactivates her safety.
“Njar la tagag…”
My razor goes rigid.
PulseWeapon shudders and whines, priming.
Body trembles. Mouth full of ashes. Wear the mask. Hide the man. Feel nothing. See everything.
Move and kill. Move and kill. I am not a man. They are not men.
The chanting swells…. “Syn tjr rjyka!”
Fear is not real.
If you’re watching, Eo, it’s time to close your eyes.
The Reaper has come. And he’s brought hell with him.
“Breach!” Holiday roars. The door falls open. I rush into the pulseField surrounding the breach point.
Everything condenses. Sights, sounds, the movement of my own body. All a haze. Holiday’s scatterFlash cackles through the two-meter opening in the bulkhead, frying any unshielded optic nerves on the other side. A secondary fusion grenade detonates. I jump through the hole into smoke, going right, Victra comes with. Sefi goes left. Enemy fire hits us immediately. My shield cackles with the sound of hail hitting a tin roof. The end of the hall a chaos of muzzle flashes and pulse fire.
Superheated projectiles slice through the smoke.
I fire my pulseFist, arm jerking spasmodically. Ducking and moving so I don’t block the entrance.
Something slams into me. I stumble to the left wall, superheated particles screaming from my fist. My shield crackles with coilgun rounds that impact the energy barrier and fall, flattened to the ground at my feet. More Obsidian fill the hall behind me. They move so fast. It’s a cacophony of sound. My tactical mind shoves the facts to the front. We’re pinned down. Men die in the breach. Must move forward.
Something whizzes past my head. It detonates behind at the entrance. Limbs and armor slop onto the floor. The helmet mutes the massive noise, saving my eardrums. I stumble forward, trying to get out of the killzone. Another grenade lands among us. Detonating after an Obsidian dives upon it. More meat for the grinder. Must close the distance. Can’t see anything in front of me. So much smoke. Fire.
To hell with this.
With a roar of frustration, I activate my gravBoots and rocket down the narrow hall eighty kilometers an hour toward our assailants, firing as I go. Flying a meter above the floor. Victra follows. It’s a whole squad of twenty Grays led by a Gold legate in brilliant silver armor. I crash into the Gold. Razor outstretched, piercing his shield and spearing his brain. Crash to the ground. Arm pinned under me. The Gray response team separates from one another, keeping me at the center as I
struggle to my feet. One shoots an ion-charge into my back. Blue lightning spasms over my shields, killing them. I stab one Gray through the neck with my razor. Two others fire into my chest. My armor dents with a dozen rounds. I stumble back. A heavy railgun with a boring round in the chamber levels at my head. I dip and dodge to the side, slipping on blood. Going down. The gun goes off and opens a hole the size of a man’s head in the floor.
Then Victra smashes into the Grays. Bursting side to side with her gravBoots, an angry wrecking
ball. Shattering bones between the walls and her heavily armored body. Then the Obsidians are among the Grays, hacking them to pieces with their pulseAxes. The Grays are screaming, falling back around the corner where they have fire support. A Gray’s leg is slashed off by Sefi and he stumbles, firing his weapon into the wall. She rips his head clean off from behind.
This is horror.
The smoke. The twitching bodies and evaporation of blood as it boils out of charred wounds. A dying man’s urine pools around my armor, hissing against the superheated barrel of my pulseFist as Victra helps me up.
“Thanks.”
Her frightening bird helmet nods to me without expression.
As the rest of my platoon files through the breach, I move forward to the corner around which several of the Grays escaped. Another enemy response squad hastily sets up a heavy weapon mounted
on a floating gravPod about thirty meters down near a gravLift entrance. When it fires, a quarter of the wall above me melts. I order Holiday take my place at the corner with Trigg’s ambi-rifle.
“Four tins, one Gold,” I say. “They’ve got a mounted QR-13. Slag ’em.”
She adjusts her rifle’s multi-use barrel. “Yessir.”
At our breach point, six Valkyrie are down. A huge woman’s helmet peels back into her armor. She
vomits blood. Half her torso smokes, molten armor still melting her flesh. She tries to stand, laughing at the pain, high on god’s bread. But this is a new type of war to these women with new injuries. Unable to support herself, the Obsidian slumps against a sister who calls to Sefi. The young Queen looks at the wounds and sees Victra shake her head. A quicker learner than the rest of them, Sefi knew well what this war would cost her people. But staring it in the face is something different altogether. She says something of home to the woman, something of the sky and the feathers at summer ’s twilight. I don’t see the blade she slips into the base of the dying woman’s skull until she pulls it back out.
A hologram of Mustang’s face flashes in the corner of my screen. I open the link. “Darrow, have you breached?”
“We’re in. Double for my teams. Pressing to bridge now. What’s what?”
“You need to hurry. My ship’s under heavy fire.”
“We’re in. You’re supposed to bug out. Head to Thebe.”
“Roque used EMPs.” Her voice is tense. “Our shielding kept us up, but half my fleet’s engines are squabbed. We’re sitting dead, punching it out with him. Soon as your clawDrill hit, the Colossus started shooting to kill. They’re ripping us apart. We’re outgunned, hard. Main batteries are already at half strength.” A sick feeling rises in my gut. Roque can see us on the cameras in his ship. He knows the strength of my boarding party. It’s only a matter of time till I reach the bridge. Soon he’ll make an announcement over the com for me to surrender or he’ll kill her. “Get to the gorydamn bridge and put him down. Register?”
“Register.” I turn to face my troops, “We gotta move,” I say. “Victra, take squad command. I’m going digital. Sefi, range ahead.”
“Holiday, anytime,” Victra says eagerly, pacing back and forth in the hall. “The little lion needs our help. Come on! Come on!”
“Hold your tits,” Holiday mutters, adjusting her rifle and toggling the corner-shot feature. The barrel joints rotate so it peeks around the wall and feeds the visual link directly into her bionic eye.
Four quick bursts tear out of the gun. Thirty rounds each from the ammo magazine in the back of her armor. “Go.”
Victra and I burst around the corner, eating up meters as a Gray tries to take his companion’s place at the gun. I cut him down with my pulseFist and Victra exchanges a four move kravat set with the Gold, before skewering him with a thrust to the chest. I finish him with a stab to the throat. Holiday has her commandos haul the QR-13 with us, only able to keep pace with our long legs because of our
heavy armor.
As we press for the bridge at a full-sprint, other elements of my invasion force make for vital ship functions with a new frantic speed. It’s a lightning strike. Grays can’t move with this speed because they rely on tactics, leapfrog maneuvers, corner-shots and sly tech. The Obsidian are straight battering rams. It’s tempting to surge ahead, focus only on getting to the bridge. But I can’t abandon my plan. My platoons need me to guide them using the battlemap on my HUD. Speaking to Red and
Gray platoon leaders, I coordinate on the run as Victra leads us through the maze of metal halls and ambushes. As the platoons are pinned down, I use my com to maneuver other platoons through gravLifts and halls to flank entrenched security teams. It’s an intricate dance. Not only are we racing against the destruction of Mustang’s ship. But we’re racing against the return of the leechCraft.
Roque knows this. And less than three minutes into our insertion, the ship goes into full lockdown protocol. All gravLifts and trams and bulkheads sealed off, creating a honeycomb of obstacles throughout the ship. We can only advance fifty meters at a time. It’s a devilish system, pins down boarding forces as security teams with digital keys run about the ship at ease, flanking and creating deadly killboxes and cross-fires that can shred even a boarding party like mine. There’s no way to combat it. This is the grind of war. No matter the tech or the tactics, it all comes down to terrifying moments crouching chalk-mouthed at a corner as a friend lays down cover fire and you try not to trip over the hi-tech gear that’s wrapped around your body as you advance, head lowered, legs churning.
It’s not bravery, it’s fear of shaming yourself in the eyes of your friends that keeps you moving.
As we melt our way through bulkhead after bulkhead, Sefi’s Valkyrie feed the grinder. We’re ambushed from every side. Some of the best warriors I’ve ever seen fall with smoking holes in the
back of their helmets from Gray marksmen. They melt under pulseFist fire. They fall to a Gold knight flanked by seven Obsidian till Victra, Sefi, and I put them down with razors.
All this to reach the bridge. All this to reach a man who I could have reached out and touched the day before. If this is the cost of honor, give me a shameful murder. If I’d have stabbed Roque in the throat then, Valkyrie would not litter the ground now.
“Men and women of the Society Navy, this is the Reaper. Your ship has been boarded by the Sons of Ares…” I hear my voice over the ship’s general com unit. One of my platoons has reached the communication mainframe in the back half of the ship. Every boarding party in my fleet has copies of the speech Mustang and I recorded together to upload to boarded enemy vessels. It exhorts lowColors to aid my units, to deactivate lockdown protocol if they can, to unlock doors manually if they cannot, and to storm the armories. Most of these men and women are veterans. It’s unrealistic to expect the same sort of conversion as I had on the Pax’s crew, but every little bit helps.
The announcement works partially on the Colossus. It buys us precious time as we bypass several doors in seconds instead of the minutes it would take to melt through. Roque also turns off the artificial gravity, realizing by watching their tactics that my Obsidians don’t have zero g experience.
Society Grays push their way through halls like seals under water, taking their revenge on my floating Obsidians, robbed of their closing speed, who’ve mauled so many of their friends. In the end, one of my teams reactivates the gravity. I have them decrease it to one-sixth Earth standard so that my force is not encumbered by the heavy armor we wear. It’s a blessing on our lungs and legs.
After cutting through a security team of Grays, we finally reach the bridge, battered and bloody. I crouch, panting and increase the oxygen circulation in my armor. Swimming in sweat, I activate a stim injection in my gear to keep me from feeling the gash in my biceps where a Gold’s razor caught me. The needle bites into my thigh. Reports come from my other platoons that they’ve lost contact with the enemy, which means they’re being consolidated by Roque, redirected, likely to us. Back to the bridge door, I stare across the circular, exposed antechamber to the bridge and remember how my
instructor at the Academy demonstrated the geometric deadliness of the space for anyone besieging a starburst bridge design like this. Three halls from three directions lead to the circular room, including a gravLift in the center. It’s indefensible, and Roque’s marines are coming.
“Roque, darling,” Victra calls up to the cameras in the ceiling as Holiday and her team set up the drill on the door. “How I have pined for you since the garden. Are you there?” She sighs. “I’ll just assume you are. Listen, I understand. You think we must be wroth with you, what with the murder of my mother, the execution of our friends, the bullets in the spine, the poison, and a year of torture for dear Reaper and I, but that’s not so. We just want to put you in a box. Maybe several. Would you like that? It’s very poetic.”
Holiday’s remaining three commandos are attaching magnetic clamps to the door and mounting their thermal drill. She taps a few commands and the eye of the drill begins to spin.
Sefi returns from her scouting. Her helmet slithers back into her armor. “Many enemies come from
tunnel.” She points to the middle hall. “I killed their leader, but more Golds follow.” She didn’t just kill the leader. She brought his head back. But she’s limping and her left arm bleeds.
“Oh, hell. That’s Flagilus,” Victra says, regarding the head. “He was in my school house. Very sweet fellow actually. Wonderful cook.”
“How many are coming, Sefi?”
“Enough to give us a good death.”
“Shit. Shit. Shit.” Holiday punches the door behind me.
“It’s too thick isn’t it?” I ask.
“Yeah.” She pulls her assault helmet off. Her Mohawk is mashed to the side. Tense face dripping with sweat. “Door ’s not VDY specs like the rest of the ship. It’s Ganymede Industries. Custom. At least twice as thick.”
“How long will it take to get through?” I repeat.
“At full burn? Fourteen minutes?” she guesses.
“Fourteen?” Victra repeats.
“Maybe more.”
I turn, hissing the anger out. The women know as well as I that we don’t have even five minutes. I hail Mustang’s coms. No answer. Her ship must be dying. Bloodydamn. Stay alive. Just stay alive.
Why did I ever let her out of my sight?
“We charge them,” Victra’s saying. “Straight down the middle hall. They’ll run like foxes from hounds.”
“Yes,” Sefi says, finding a more kindred spirit in Victra than either might have thought prior to shedding blood together. “I will follow you, daughter of the sun. To glory.”
“Piss on glory,” Holiday says. “Let the drill do its work.”
“And sit here to die like Pixies?” Victra asks.
Before I can say a word or do much of anything, there’s a metallic wheeze behind me from the hydraulics in the wall as the door to the bridge opens.
We surge onto the bridge, expecting an ambush. Instead, it’s calm. Clean, lights dimmed, just as Roque prefers it. Beethoven streams out from hidden speakers. Everyone is still at their stations. Wan faces illuminated by pale light. Two Golds walk along the wide metal path that leads over the pits toward the front of the bridge where Roque stands orchestrating his battle before a thirty-meter-wide holographic projection. Ships dance among the sensors. Framed by fire, he cycles through images, issuing commands like a great conductor summoning the passion of an orchestra. His mind a beautiful, terrible weapon. He’s destroying our fleet. Mustang’s Dejah Thoris leaks flame from her oxygen stores as the Colossus and her three escort destroyers continue to hammer her with railguns.
Men and debris float through space.This is just one part of the larger battle. The great host of his force, including Antonia, has pursued Romulus, Orion and the Telemanuses toward Jupiter.
To our left, twenty meters away, near the bridge’s armory, a tactical squad of Obsidian and Grays
secure their heavy weapons and listen intently to their Gold commanders, preparing to defend their bridge against me.
And just to our right, at the control panel by the now open door, unseen and unnoticed by anyone
else on the bridge, trembles a small Pink in a white valet’s uniform. The passcode display glows green under her hands. Her thin figure is frail against the backdrop of war. But the woman’s face is set defiantly, her finger on the door ’s release button, her mouth spreading into the most delightful little smile as she shuts the door behind us.
All this in three seconds. The Gold infantry commander sees us.
Wolves, lovely as they are when they howl, kill best in silence. So I point to the left and the Obsidian surge toward the soldiers listening to the Gold. He shouts for them to turn, but Sefi is already on his men before they can lift their weapons. Dancing through them with her blades fluttering into faces and knees. Her Valkyrie smash into the rest. Only two guns go off by the time the Gold’s body slides off the end of Sefi’s razor and thumps to the floor.
Grays fire at us from the other side of the pit. Holiday and her commandos pick them off. My helmet slithers away. “Roque,” I snarl as my men continue to kill.
He’s turned now from his battle to see me. All the nobility in him, all the cold-blooded Imperator melting away, leaving him a stunned, startled man. Victra and I stalk across the bridge, Blues beneath us to every side, staring up at us in confusion and fear even as their ship is engaged in battle. Silently, Roque’s two Praetorians come at us. Both wear black and purple armor adorned with the silver quarter moon of House Lune. We pair off on the metal bridge in the hydra. Victra taking the right, me the left. My Praetorian is shorter than I. Her helmet off, hair in a tight bun, ready to proclaim the
grand laurels of her family. “My name is Felicia au…” I feint a whip at her face. She brings her blade up, and Victra goes diagonal and impales her at the belly button. I finish her off with a neat decapitation.
“Bye, Felicia.” Victra spits, turning to the last Praetorian. “No substance these days. Are you of the same fiber?” The man drops his razor and goes to his knees, saying something about surrender.
Victra’s about to cut his head off anyway, when she glimpses me out of the corner of her eye.
Grudgingly, she accepts his surrender, kicking him in the face and hands him over to our Obsidians who secure the bridge. “You like the clawDrills?” Victra asks, pacing to Roque’s left. Hungry for the kill. “That’s some poetic justice for you, you little backstabbing bitch.”
The Blues still watch on, unsure of what to do. The boarding party that came for us now fills our
place in the corridor outside the bridge. We left the drill, but it would take them ten minutes at least to breach the door.
The com on Roque’s head buzzes with requests for orders. Squadrons he’d sent on attack runs now
drift, over-exposed. Their commanders used to being guided by the invisible hand now fight blind to the overall battle. It’s the flaw in Roque’s strategy. The individual initiative now creates chaos, because the central intelligence has just gone silent.
“Roque, tell your fleet to stand down,” I demand. I’m soaked with sweat. Hamstring pulled. Hand
trembling with exhaustion. I take a heavy step forward. Boot clomping on the steel. “Do it.”
He stares past me, at the Pink who let us onto the bridge. Voice thick with the betrayal of a lover instead of that of a master. “Amathea…even you?” The young woman is not shamed by his sadness.
She pulls her shoulders back, anchoring herself to the spot. She removes the rose badge on her collar that marks her the property of the gens Fabii and drops it to the ground.
A tremor passes through my friend. “You romantic sop.” Victra laughs. I close the distance between myself and Roque. Boots tracking blood over his gray steel deck. I point to the display behind him where Mustang’s ship is dying. I can see the stars glittering through holes in her hull, but still the destroyers punish her. They’re orientated off the bow of the Pax, thirty kilometers closer than her ship.
“Tell them to stop firing!” I say, pointing my razor at him. His own is on his hip. He knows how
little it means to draw it against me. “Do it now.”
“No.”
“That’s Mustang!” I say.
“She chose her fate.”
“How many men did you send?” I ask coldly. “How many did you send to the Pax to bring me back here? Fifteen thousand? How many are on those destroyers?” I slide back the protective sheath over my datapad on my left forearm and summon the reactor diagnostics of the Pax. It pulses red. We’ve reversed the coolant flow to let the reactor overheat. A slight increase in the output demand and it goes thermal. “Tell them to cease fire or their lives are forfeit.”
He lifts his gentle chin. “According to my conscience I can give no such order.”
He knows what it means
“Then this is on both of us.”
His head snaps toward his comBlue. “Cyrus, tell the destroyers to take evasive action.”
“Too late,” Victra says as I raise the output on the generator. It throbs an evil crimson on my datapad, washing us with its light. And on the hologram behind Roque, the Pax begins to release gouts of blue flame. Frantically responding to their Imperator, the destroyers halt their barrage on Mustang and try to jet away, but a bright light implodes in the center of the Pax, enveloping the metal decks and
crumpling the hull as energy spasms outward. The shock wave hits the destroyers and, crumpling their hulls, smashes them into one another. The Colossus shudders around us and we’re knocked through space as well, but her shielding holds. The Dejah Thoris drifts, lights dark. I can only pray that Mustang is alive. I bite the inside of my cheek to make me focus.
“Why didn’t you just use our guns,” Roque says, shaken by the loss of his men, of his destroyers, at being so outmaneuvered. “You could have crippled them….”
“I’m saving these guns,” I say.
“They won’t save you.” He turns back to me. “My fleet has yours in flight. They will decimate the
remainder and return here and take the Colossus back. Then we’ll see then how well you hold a bridge.”
“Silly Poet. Haven’t you wondered where Sevro is?” Victra asks. “Don’t tell me you lost track of
him in all this.” She nods to the screen where his fleet pursues the routed forces of the Moon Lords and Orion toward Jupiter. “He’s about to make his entry.”
When the battle began, the outermost of the inner four moons of Jupiter, Thebe, was in far rotation.
But as the battle dragged on, her orbit brought her closer, and closer, taking her across the path of my now-retreating navy, just under twenty thousand kilometers from Io. Led by Antonia’s flagship, Roque’s fleet pursued, as they should have, to complete the destruction of my forces. What they did not anticipate was that my ships had always planned to bring them to Thebe, the proverbial dead horse.
While I negotiated with Romulus, teams of Helldivers were melting caverns into the face of barren
Thebe. Now, as Roque’s battlecruisers and torchShips pass the moon, Sevro and six thousand soldiers in starShells pour out of the caverns. And out the other side of the moon pours two thousand leechCraft packed with fifty thousand Obsidians and forty thousand screaming Reds. Railguns spray.
Flak deploys last minute. But my forces envelope the enemy, latching onto a their hulls like a cloud of Luna gutter mosquitos to burrow into their guts and claim the ships from the inside.
Yet even my victory carries betrayal. Romulus had Gold leechCraft of his own prepared to launch
from the surface of the moon, so that he could capture ships as well to balance my gains. But I need the ships more than he. And my Reds collapsed the mouth of their tunnels at the same time Sevro launches. By the time he realizes the sabotage, my fleet will outnumber his.
“I could not lure you to an asteroid field, so I brought one to you,” I say to Roque as we watch the battle unfold.
“Well played,” Roque whispers. But we both know the plan works only because I have a hundred
thousand Obsidian and he does not. At most, his entire fleet has ten thousand. Probably more like seven. Worse, how could he have known that I had so many when every other Sons of Ares attack has
rested on the backs of Reds? Battles are won months before they are fought. I never had enough ships to beat him. But now my ships will continue to flee, continue to run away from his guns as my men
carve his battlecruisers apart from the inside. Slowly his ships will become my ships and fire on the very vessels they’re in formation with. You can’t defend against that. He can vent the ships, but my men will have magnetic gear, breathing masks. He’ll only kill his own.
“The day is lost,” I say to the thin Imperator. But you can still save lives. Tell your fleet to stand down.”
He shakes his head.
“You’re in a corner, Poet,” Victra says. “There’s no getting out. Time to do the right thing. I know it’s been a while.”
“And destroy what’s left of my honor?” he asks quietly as a group of twenty men in starShells
penetrate the rear hangar of a nearby destroyer. “I think not.”
“Honor?” Victra sneers. “What honor do you think you have? We were your friends and you gave
us up. Not just to be killed. But to be put in boxes. To be electrocuted. Burned. Tortured night and day for a year.” Here in armor, it’s hard to imagine the blond warrior to have ever been a victim. But in her eyes there’s that special sadness that comes from seeing the void. From feeling cut away from the rest of humanity. Her voice is thick with emotion. “We were your friends.”
“I swore an oath to protect the Society, Victra. The same oath you both swore the day we stood before our betters and took the scar upon our faces. To protect the civilization that brought order to man. Look upon what you’ve done instead.” He eyes the Valkyrie behind us in disgust.
“You don’t live in a bedtime story, whimpering little sod,” she snaps. “You think any of them care about you? Antonia? The Jackal? The Sovereign?”
“No,” he says quietly. “I have no such illusions. But it’s not about them. It’s not about me. Not every life is meant to be warm. Sometimes the cold is our duty. Even if it pulls us from those we love.” He looks pityingly at her. “You’ll never be what Darrow wants. You have to know that.”
“You think I’m here for him?” she asks.
Roque frowns. “Then it’s revenge?”
“No,” she says angrily. “It’s more than that.”
“Who are you trying to fool?” Roque asks, jerking his head toward me. “Him or yourself?” The
question catches Victra off guard.
“Roque, think of your men,” I say. “How many more have to die?”
“If you care so much for life, tell yours to stop firing,” Roque replies. “Tell them to fall in line and understand that life isn’t free. It isn’t without sacrifice. If all take what they want, how long will it be till there’s nothing left?”
It breaks me to hear him say those words.
My friend has always had his own way of things. His own tides that come in and out. It is not in his nature to hate. Nor was it in mine. Our worlds made us what we are, and all this pain we suffer is to fix the folly of those who came before, who shaped the world in their image and left us the ruin of their feast. Ships detonate in his irises. Washing his pale face with furious light.
“All this…,” he whispers, feeling the end coming. “Was she so lovely?”
“Yes. She was like you,” I say. “A dreamer.” He’s too young to look so old. Were it not for the lines on his face and the world between us, it would seem only yesterday that he crouched before me as I shivered on the floor of the Mars Castle after killing Julian and he told me that when you’re thrown in the deep, there’s only one choice. Keep swimming or drown. I should have loved him more. I would
have done anything to keep him at my side and show him the love he deserves.
But life is the present and the future, not the past.
It’s as if we look at each other from distant shores and the river between widens and roars and darkens till our faces are pale shards of the moon in the deep night. More ideas of the boys we were than the men we are. I see the resolve forming in his face. The determination pulling him away from this life.
“You don’t have to die.”
“I have lost the invincible armada,” he says, stepping back, his hand tightening on his razor. Behind him, the display shows Sevro’s trap ruining the main body of his fleet. “How can I go on? How can I bear this shame?”
“I know shame. I watched my wife die,” I say. “Then I killed myself. Let them hang me to end it all.
To escape the pain. I’ve felt that guilt every day since. This is not the way out.”
“My heart breaks for who you were,” he says. “For that boy who watched his wife die. My heart broke in that garden. It breaks now knowing all you suffered. But the only solace was my duty, and now that has been robbed from me. All the remittance I’ve attempted to make…gone. I love the Society. I love my people.” His voice softens. “Can’t you see that?”
“I can.”
“And you love yours.” It’s not judgment, not forgiveness that he gives me. It’s just a smile. “I cannot watch mine fade. I cannot watch it all burn.”
“It won’t.”
“It will. Our age is ending. I feel the days shortening. The brief light dimming upon the kingdom of man.”
“Roque…”
“Let him do it,” Victra says from behind me. “He chose his fate.” I hate her for being so cold even now. How can she not see that beneath his deeds, he’s a good man? He’s still our friend, despite what he’s done to us.
“I’m sorry for what happened, Victra. Remember me fondly.”
“I won’t.”
He favors her with a sad smile as he strips the Imperator badge from his left shoulder and clutches it in his hand, drawing his strength from it. But then he tosses it to the ground. There’s tears in his eyes as he strips away the other. “I do not deserve these. But I shall have glory by losing this day.
More than you by vile conquest shall attain.”
“Roque, just listen to me. This not the end. This is the beginning. We can repair what’s broken. The worlds need Roque au Fabii.” I hesitate. “I need you.”
“There is no place for me in your world. We were brothers, but I would kill you, if only I had the power.”
I’m in a dream. Unable to change the forces that move around me. To stop the sand from slipping
through my fingers. I set this into motion but didn’t have the heart or strength or cunning or whatever the hell I needed to stop it. No matter what I do or say, Roque was lost to me the moment he discovered what I am.
I step toward him, thinking I can take his razor from his hand without killing him, but he knows my intention and he holds up his off hand plaintively. As if to comfort me and beg me the mercy of letting him die as he lived. “Be still. Night hangs upon mine eyes.” He looks to me, eyes full with tears.
“Keep swimming, my friend,” I tell him.
With a gentle nod, he wraps his razor whip around his throat and stiffens his spine. “I am Roque au Fabii of the gens Fabii. My ancestors walked upon red Mars. They fell upon Old Earth. I have lost the day, but I have not lost myself. I will not be a prisoner.” His eyes close. His hand trembles. “I am the star in the night sky. I am the blade in the twilight. I am the god, the glory.” His breath shudders out.
He is afraid. “I am the Gold.”
And there, on the bridge of his invincible warship as his famous fleet falls to ruin behind him, the Poet of Deimos takes his own life. Somewhere the wind howls and the darkness whispers that I’m running out of friends, running out of light. The blood slithers away from his body toward my boots.
A shard of my own reflection trapped in its red fingers.
Victra is less shaken than I. She assumes command as I linger over Roque’s corpse. His lifeless eyes stare at the ground. Blood thunders in my ears. Yet the war rages on. Victra’s standing over the Blue operations pit, face drawn in determination.
“Does anyone contest that this ship now belongs to the Rising?” Not a sailor says a word. “Good.
Follow orders and you’ll keep your post. If you can’t follow orders, stand up now and you’ll be a prisoner of war. If you say you can follow orders but don’t, we shoot you in the head. Choose.” Seven Blues stand. Holiday escorts them out of the pit. “Welcome to the Rising,” Victra says to the remainders. “The battle is far from won. Give me a direct link to Persephone’s Howl and Reynard.
Main screen . ”
“Belay that,” I say. “Victra, make the call on your datapad. I don’t want to broadcast the fact that we have taken this ship just yet.”
Victra nods and punches her datapad several times. Orion and Daxo appear on the holo. The dark
woman speaks first. “Victra, where is Darrow?”
“Here,” Victra says quickly. “What’s your status? Have you heard from Virginia?”
“A third of the enemy fleet is boarded. Virginia is aboard an escape pod, about to be picked up by the Echo of Ismenia. Sevro’s in the halls of their secondary flagship. Periodic reports. He’s making headway. Telemanuses and Raa are pinching….”
“An even match,” Daxo says. “We’ll need the Colossus to tilt the odds. My father and sisters have boarded the Pandora. They’re striking for Antonia….”
Their conversation feels a world away.
Through my grief, I feel Sefi approach me. She kneels beside Roque. “This man was your friend,”
she says. I nod numbly. “He is not gone. He is here.” She touches her own heart. “He is there.” She points to the stars on the holo. I look over at her, surprised by the deep current she reveals to me. The respect she gives Roque now doesn’t heal my wounds, but it makes them feel less hollow. “Let him
see,” she says, nodding to his eyes. The purest gold, they stare now at the ground. So I unscrew my gauntlet and close them with my bare fingers. Sefi smiles and I gain my feet beside her.
“Pandora is moving lateral to sector D-6, ” Orion says of Antonia’s ship. On the display, the Severus-Julii ships are separating from the Sword Armada and firing at each other to try and skin away the leechCraft which festoon them. She’s shifting power to engines and away from shields and
angling away from the engagement. “Now D-7.”
“She’s abandoning them,” Victra says, dumbfounded. “The little shit is saving her own hide.” The
Society Praetors must not believe what they’re seeing. Even if I brought the Colossus to bear on them,
the fleets would be evenly matched. The battle would last another twelve hours and exhaust both our fleets. Now it crumbles apart.
Whether by cowardice or betrayal, I don’t know, but Antonia just gave us the battle on a silver platter.
“She’s left us a gap,” Orion says. Her eyes go distant as she syncs with her ship captains and her own vessel, thrusting the huge capital ships into the region formerly occupied by Antonia, which brings them into the flank of the main enemy body.
“Do not let her escape!” Victra snarls.
But neither Daxo nor Orion can spare the ships to pursue Antonia. They’re too busy taking advantage of her absence. “We can catch her,” Victra says to herself. “Engines, prepare to give us sixty percent thrust, escalate by ten percent over five. Helmsman, set our course for the Pandora. ”
I make a quick assessment. Of our small battle at the rear of the warzone, we’re the only ship still battle-ready. The rest are drifting rubble. But the Colossus has not yet made an action or a declaration that its bridge has been taken by the Rising. Which means we have an opportunity.
“Belay that,” I snap.
“What?” Victra wheels on me. “Darrow, we have to catch her.”
“There’s something else that needs doing.”
“She’ll escape!”
“And we’ll hunt her down.”
“Not if she gets enough of a lead. We’ll be tied here for hours. You promised me my sister.”
“And I’ll deliver. Think beyond yourself,” I say. “Bridge shield down.” I ignore the wrathful woman’s glare and walk past Roque’s body to peer into the blackness of space as the metal shielding beyond the glass viewports slides into the wall. In the far distance ships flicker and flash against the marble backdrop of Jupiter. Io is beneath us, and far to our left, the city moon of Ganymede glows, large as a plum.
“Holiday, recall all available infantry to protect the bridge and make safe the vessel. Sefi make sure no one gets through that door. Helmsman, set course for Ganymede. Do not make any Society ships
aware the bridge is taken. Do I make myself clear? No broadcasts.” The Blues follow my instructions.
“To Ganymede?” Victra asks, eying her sister ’s ship. “But Antonia, the battle…”
“The battle is won. Your sister made sure of that.”
“Then what are we doing?”
Our ship’s engines throb and we untangle ourselves from the wreckage of the Pax and Mustang’s devastated strike group. “Winning the next war. Excuse me.”
I wipe blood from my armored kneecap onto my face and let my helmet slither over my head. The
HUD display expands. I wait. And then, as expected, a call from Romulus comes. I let it flash on the left hand side of my screen, altering my breathing so it seems I’ve been running. I accept the call. His face expands over the left eighth of my visor ’s vision. He’s in a firefight, but my vision is as constricted as his. All I can see is his face in his helmet. “Darrow. Where are you?”
“In the halls,” I say. I pant and crouch on a knee as if taking respite. “Pressing for the Colossus’s bridge . ”
“You’re not in yet?”
“Roque initiated lockdown protocol. It’s thick going,” I say.
“Darrow, listen carefully. The Colossus has altered trajectory and is headed for Ganymede.”
“The docks,” I whisper intensely. “He’s going for the docks. Can any ships intercept?”
“No! They’re out of position. If Octavia can’t win, she’ll ruin us. Those docks are my people’s future. You must take that bridge at all cost!”
“I will…but Romulus. He has nukes on board. What if it’s not just the docks he’s going for?”
Romulus pales. “Stop him. Please. Your people are down there too.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“Thank you, Darrow. And good luck. First cohort, on me…”
The connection dies. I remove my helmet. My men stare at me. They haven’t heard the conversation, but they know what I’m doing now. “You’re going to destroy Romulus’s dockyards around Ganymede,” Victra says.
“Holy shit,” Holiday mutters. “Holy shit.”
“I’m not destroying anything,” I reply. “I’m fighting my way through corridors. Trying to reach the bridge. Roque is ordering this move as his last act of violence before I claim his command.”
Victra’s eyes light up, but even she has reservations.
“If Romulus finds out, if he even suspects, he’ll fire on our forces and everything we’ve won today goes to ash.”
“And who will tell him?” I ask. I look around the bridge. “Who will tell him?” I look to Holiday. “If anyone sends a signal out, shoot them in the head. Wipe the video memory from the whole ship.”
If I ruin Ganymede’s dockyards the Rim won’t be able to threaten us for fifty years. Romulus is an ally today, but I know he will threaten the core if the Rising succeeds. If I must give Roque for this victory, if I must give the Sons on these moons, I will take something in return. I look down. Red bootprints follow my path. I didn’t even realize I’d stepped in Roque’s blood.
We carve our way free of the debris formed by Mustang’s fleet and mine and break away from Jupiter toward Ganymede, leaving her behind. I feel the pulsing desperation as the Moon Lords send their fastest craft to intercept us. We shoot them down. All the pride and hope of Romulus’s people are in the rivets and assembly lines and electric shops of that dull gray ring of metal. All their promises of power and future independence are at my mercy.
When I reach the sparkling gem that is Ganymede, I bring the Colossus parallel to the monument of industry they’ve built in orbit at her equator. The Valkyrie gather behind us at the viewport. Sefi staring in awe at the majesty and triumph of Gold will. Two hundred kilometers of docks. Hundreds
of haulers and freighters. Birthplace of the greatest ships in the Sol System including the Colossus herself. Like any good monster of myth, the girl must eat her mother before being free to pursue her true destiny. That destiny is leading the assault on the Core.
“Men built this?” Sefi asks with quiet reverence. Many of her Valkyrie have fallen to a knee to watch in wonder.
“My people built it,” I say. “Reds.”
“It took two hundred fifty years…It’s how old the first dock there is,” Victra says, shoulder to shoulder with me. Hundreds of escape pods flower out from her metal carapace. They know why we’re here. They’re evacuating the senior administrators, the overseers. I’m under no delusion. I know who will die when we fire.
“There’s still going to be thousands of Reds on there.” Holiday says quietly to me. “Oranges, Blues…Grays.”
“He knows that,” Victra says.
Holiday doesn’t leave my side. “You sure you want to do this, sir?”
“Want to?” I ask hollowly. “Since when has any of this been about what we want?” I turn to the helmsman, about to give the order when Victra puts a hand on my shoulder.
“Share the load, darling. This one’s on me.” Her Aureate voice rings clear and loud. “Helmsman, open fire with all port batteries. Launch tubes twenty-one through fifty at their center-line.”
Together, we stand shoulder to shoulder and watch the warship lay ruin to the defenseless dock.
Sefi stares out in profound awe. She has watched the holos of ship warfare, but her war until now, has been narrow halls and men and gunfire. This is the first time they see what a vessel of war can do.
And for the first time, I see her frightened.
It’s a crime that the marvel should die like this. No song. Nothing but silence and the unblinking gaze of the stars to herald the end of one of the great monuments of the Golden Age. And I hear in the back of my mind, that age old truth of darkness whispering to me.
Death begets death begets death…
The moment is sadder than I wanted. So I turn to Sefi as the dock continues to fall apart. The shattered bits drifting down to the moon, where they will fall into the sea or upon the cities of Ganymede.
“The ship must be renamed,” I say, “I would like you to choose.”
Her face is stained with white light.
“Tyr Morga,” she says without hesitation.
“What’s that mean?” Holiday asks.
I look back out the viewport as explosions ripple through the dock and her escape pods flare against the atmosphere of Ganymede. “It means Morning Star.”
The Sword Armada is shattered. More than half destroyed. A quarter seized by my ships. The remainder fled with Antonia or in little ragged bands, rallying around the remaining Praetors to sprint for the Core. I sent Thraxa and her sisters in fast-moving corvettes out under Victra’s command to reel Antonia in and recapture Kavax, who was captured by Antonia’s forces while attempting to board the Pandora. I asked Sevro to go with Victra, thinking to keep the two of them together, but he went to her ship then returned a half hour before it departed, wrathful and quiet, refusing to discuss whatever it was that transpired.
For her part, Mustang is beside herself with worry for Kavax, though she makes a brave face.
She’d lead the rescue mission herself if she weren’t needed in the main fleet. We make repairs where we can to make the ships fit for travel. We scuttle the ships we can’t save, and search the naval debris for survivors. A tentative alliance exists between the Rising and the Moon Lords, one that will not last long.
I’ve not slept since the battle two days ago. Neither, it seems, has Romulus. His eyes are dark with anger and exhaustion. He’s lost an arm and a son on the day and more, so much more. Neither one of us could risk meeting in person. So all we have left between us is this holo conference.
“As promised, you have your independence,” I say.
“And you have your ships,” he replies. Marble columns stretch up behind him, carved with Ptolemaic effigies. He’s on Ganymede, in the Hanging Palace. The heart of their civilization. “But they will not be enough to defeat the Core. The Ash Lord will be waiting for you.”
“I hope so. I have plans for his master.”
“Do you sail on Mars?”
“Perhaps.”
He allows a thoughtful silence. “There’s one thing I find curious about the battle. Of all the ships my men boarded, not one nuclear weapon over five megatons was found. Despite your claims.
Despite your…evidence.”
“My men found plenty enough,” I lie. “Come aboard if you doubt me. It’s hardly curious that they
would store them on the Colossus. Roque would want to keep them under tight watch. We’re only lucky that I managed to take bridge when I did. Docks can be rebuilt. Lives cannot.”
“Did they ever have them?” Romulus asks.
“Would I risk the future of my people on a lie?” I smile without humor. “Your moons are safe. You
define your own future now, Romulus. Do not look the gift horse in the mouth.”
“Indeed,” he says, though he sees through the lie now. Knows he was manipulated. But it is the lie
he must sell to his own people if he wants peace. They cannot afford to go to war with me now, but their honor would demand it if they knew what I’d done. And if they went to war with me, I would likely win. I have more ships now. But they’d hurt me bad enough to ruin my real war against the Core. So Romulus swallows my lies. And I swallow the guilt of leaving hundreds of millions in slavery and personally signing the death warrants of thousands of Sons of Ares to Romulus’s police. I gave them warning. But not all will escape. “I would like your fleet to depart before end of day,”
Romulus says.
“It will take three days to search the debris for our survivors,” I say. “We will leave then.”
“Very well. My ships will escort your fleet to the boundaries we agreed upon. When your flagship
crosses into the asteroid belt, you may never return. If one ship under your command crosses that boundary, it will be war between us.”
“I remember the terms.”
“See that you do. Give my regards to the Core. I’ll certainly give yours to the Sons of Ares you leave behind.” He terminates the signal.
—
We depart three days after my conference with Romulus, making additional repairs as we travel.
Welders and repairmen dot hulls like benevolent barnacles. Though we lost more than twenty-five capital ships during the battle, we’ve gained over seventy more. It is one of the greatest military victories in modern history, but victories are less romantic when you’re cleaning your friends off the floor.
It’s easy to be bold in the moment, because all you have is what you can process: see, smell, feel, taste. And that’s a very small amount of what is. But afterward, when everything decompresses and uncoils bit by bit, and the horror of what you did and what happened to your friends hits you. It’s overwhelming. That’s the curse of this naval war. You fight, then spend months waiting, engaged only by the tedium of routine. Then you fight again.
I’ve not yet told my men where we sail. They don’t ask me themselves, but their officers do. And
again I give them the same answer.
“Where we must.”
The core of my army is the Sons of Ares, and they are experienced in hardship. They organize dances and gatherings and force jubilation down war-weary throats. It seems to take. Men and women whistle in the halls as we distance ourselves from Jupiter. They sew unit badges onto uniforms and paint starShells in wild colors. There’s a vibrancy here different from the cold precision of the Society Navy. Still they keep mostly to their Color, blending only when assigned to do so. It’s not as harmonious as I thought it would be, but it’s a start. I feel disconnected from it all even as I smile and lead as best I know. I killed ten men in the corridors. Killed another thirteen thousand of my own when we destroyed the docks. Their faces don’t haunt me. But that feeling of dread is hard to lose.
We have not yet been able to contact the Sons of Ares. Communications are blacked out across all
channels. Which means Narol succeeded in destroying the relays as he promised. Gold and Red are
just as blind now.
I give Roque the burial he would have wanted. Not in the soil of some foreign moon, but in the sun.
His casket is made of metal. A torpedo with a hatch through which Mustang and I slip his body. The Howlers smuggled him from the overflowing morgue so we could say goodbye to him in secret.
With so many of our own dead, it would not do to see me honor an enemy so deeply.
Few mourn the death of my friend. Roque, if he is remembered by his people, will forever be
known as The Man Who Lost the Fleet. A modern Gaius Terentius Varro, the fool who let Hannibal encircle him at Cannae. Or Alfred Jones. The American general who went mad and lost his Imperium’s dreaded mech division in the Conquering. To my people, he is just another Gold who thought himself immortal till the Reaper showed him otherwise.
It’s a lonely thing carrying the body of someone dead and loved. Like a vase you know will never
again hold flowers. I wish he believed as firmly in the afterlife as I once did, as Ragnar did. I’m not sure when I lost my faith. I don’t think it’s something that just happens. Maybe I’ve been worn down bit by bit, pretending to believe in the Vale because it’s easier than the alternative. I wish Roque would have thought he was going to a better world. But he died believing only in Gold, and anything that believes only in itself cannot go happily into the night.
When it is my turn to say goodbye, I stare at his face and see nothing but memories. I think of him on the bed reading before the Gala, before I stabbed him with the sedative. I see him in his suit, pleading with me to come along with him and Mustang to the Opera in Agea, saying how much I’d
delight in the plight of Orpheus. I see him laughing by the fire at her estate after the Battle of Mars.
His arms around me as he sobbed after I came home to House Mars when we were hardly more than
boys.
Now he is cold. Eyes ringed with circles. All the promise of youth fled. All the possibilities of family and children and joy and growing old and wise together are gone because of me. I’m reminded of Tactus now, and I feel tears coming.
My friends, the Howlers in particular, do not much like that I’ve let Cassius come to the funeral. But I could not stand the idea of sending Roque to the sun without the Bellona kissing him farewell. His legs are chained. Hands manacled behind his back with magnetic cuffs. I un-cuff them so he can say goodbye properly. Which he does. Leaning to kiss Roque farewell on the brow.
Sevro, pitiless even now, slams shut the metal lid after Cassius is done. Like Mustang, the little Gold came for me, in case I needed him. He has no love for the man, no heart for someone who betrayed me and Victra. Loyalty is everything to him. And, in his mind, Roque had none. So too with Mustang. Roque betrayed her as readily as he betrayed me. He cost her a father. And though she can understand Augustus was not the best of men, he was her father nonetheless.
My friends wait for me to say something. There’s nothing I can say that will not anger them. So, as Mustang recommended, I spare them the indignity of having to listen to compliments about a man who signed their death warrants, and instead recite the most relevant lines of one of his old favorites.
Fear no more the heat o’ the sun
Nor the furious winter’s rages,
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages;
Golden lads and girls all must
As chimney sweepers come to dust
“Per aspera, ad astra,” my Golden friends whisper, even Sevro. And with a press of a button, Roque disappears from our lives to begin his last journey to join Ragnar and generations of fallen warriors in the sun. I remain behind. The others leave. Mustang lingers with me, eyes following Cassius as he’s escorted away.
“What are your plans for him?” she asks me when we’re left alone.
“I don’t know,” I say, angry she would ask that now.
“Darrow, are you all right?”
“Fine. I just need to be alone right now.”
“OK.” She doesn’t leave me. Instead, she steps closer. “It’s not your fault.”
“I said I want to be alone.”
“It’s not your fault.” I look over at her, angry she won’t leave, but when I see how gentle her eyes are, how open to me they are, I feel the tension in my ribs release. The tears come unbidden.
Streaking down my cheeks. “It’s not your fault,” she says, pulling me close as I feel the first sob rattle my chest. She wraps her arms around my waist and puts her forehead into my chest. “It’s not your fault.”
—
Later that night my friends and I have supper together in the stateroom I’ve inherited from Roque. It’s a quiet affair. Even Sevro doesn’t have much to say. He’s been quiet since Victra left, something gnawing in the back of his mind. The trauma of the past few days weighs heavy on all of us. But these few men and women know where we travel, and it’s that knowledge that adds even more weight than
the regular soldier carries.
Mustang wants to stay behind with me, but I don’t want her to. I need time to think. So I quietly click the door shut behind her. I am alone. Not just at the table in my suite, but in my grief. My friends came to Roque’s funeral for me, not him. Only Sefi was kind about his passing, because over the course of our journey to Jupiter she learned of Roque’s prowess in battle and so respected him in a pure way the others can’t. Still, of my friends, only I loved Roque as much as he deserved in the end.
The Imperator ’s stateroom still smells like Roque. I leaf through the old books on his shelves. A piece of blackened ship metal floats in a display case. Several other trophies hang on the wall. Gifts from the Sovereign “For heroism at the Battle of Deimos” and from the ArchGovernor of Mars for
“The Defense of Aureate Society.” Sophocles’s Theban Plays lies open on the bedside. I’ve not changed the page. I’ve not changed anything. As if by preserving the room I can keep him alive. A spirit in amber.
I lie down to sleep, but can only stare at the ceiling. So I rise and pour three fingers of scotch from one of his decanters and watch the holoTube in the lounge. The web is down thanks to the hacking war. Creates an eerie feeling being disconnected from the rest of humanity. So I search the old programs on the ship’s computer, skimming through vids of space pirates, noble Golden knights, Obsidian bounty hunters and a troubled Violet musician on Venus, till I find a menu with recently played vids catalogued. The most recent dates to the night before the battle.
My heart thumps heavily in my chest as I sort through the vids. I look over my shoulder, like I’m
going through someone else’s journal. Some are Aegean renditions of Roque’s favorite opera, Tristan and Isolde, but most are feeds from our time at the Institute. I sit there, my hand in the air, about to click on the feed. But instead I feel compelled to wait. I call Holiday on my com.
“You up?”
“Now I am.”
“I need a favor.”
“Don’t you always.”
—
Twenty minutes later, Cassius, chained hand and foot, shuffles in from the hall to join me. He’s
escorted by Holiday and three Sons. I excuse them. Nodding my thanks to Holiday. “I can take care of myself.”
“Begging your pardon, sir, that’s not exactly a fact.”
“Holiday.”
“We’ll be right outside, sir.”
“You can go to bed.”
“Just shout if you need anything, sir.”
“Ironclad discipline you have here,” Cassius says awkwardly after she’s left. He stands in my circular marble atrium, eying the sculptures. “Roque always did dress up a place. Unfortunately he’s got the taste of a ninety-year-old orchestra first chair.”
“Born three millennia late, wasn’t he?” I reply.
“I rather think he would have hated the toga of Rome. Distressing fashion trend, really. They made an effort to bring it back in my father ’s day. Especially during drinking bouts and some of the breakfast clubs they had back then. I’ve seen the pictures.” He shudders. “Dreadful stuff.”
“One day they’ll say it about our high collars,” I say, touching mine.
He eyes the scotch in my hand. “This a social occasion?”
“Not exactly.” I lead him into the lounge. He’s slow and loud in the forty kilogram prisoner boots they’ve sealed his feet inside, but is still more at home in the room than I am. I pour him a scotch as he sits on the couch, still expecting some sort of trap. He raises his eyebrows at the glass.
“Really, Darrow? Poison isn’t your style.”
“It’s a cache of Lagavulin. Lorn’s gift to Roque after the Siege of Mars.”
Cassius grunts. “I never was fond of irony. Whisky, on the other hand…we never had a quarrel we
couldn’t solve.” He looks through the whisky. “Fine stuff.”
“Reminds me of my father,” I say, listening to the soft hum of the air vents above. “Not that the stuff he drank was good for anything more than cleaning gears and killing brain cells.”
“How old were you when he died?” Cassius asks.
“About six, I reckon.”
“Six.” He tilts his glass thoughtfully. “My father wasn’t a solitary drinker. But sometimes I’d find him on his favorite bench. Near this eerie path on the spine of the Mons. He’d have a whisky like this.”
Cassius chews the inside of his cheek. “Those were my favorite moments with him. No one else around. Just eagles coasting in the distance. He’d tell me what sort of trees were on the hillside. He loved trees. He’d ramble on about what grew where and why and what birds liked to roost there.
Especially in winter. Something about how they looked in the cold. I never really listened to him.
Wish I had.”
He takes a drink. He’ll find the spirit in the glass. The peat, the grapefruit on the tongue, the stone of Scotland. I can never taste anything but the smoke. “Is that Castle Mars?” Cassius asks, nodding to the hologram above Roque’s console. “By Jove. It looks so small.”
“Not even the size of the engines on a torchShip,” I say.
“Boggles the mind, the exponential expectations of life.”
I laugh. “I used to think Grays were tall.”
“Well…” He smiles mischievously. “If your metric is Sevro…” He chuckles before growing serious. “I wanted to say thank you…for inviting me to the funeral. That was…surprisingly decent of you.”
“You’d have done the same.”
“Hmm.” He’s not sure of that. “This was Roque’s console?”
“Yeah. I was going through his vids. He’s rewatched most of these dozens of times. Not the strategies or the battles against other houses. But the quieter bits. You know.”
“Have you watched them?” he asks.
“I wanted to wait for you.”
He’s struck by that, and suspicious of my hospitality.
So I press play and we fall back into the boys we were in the Institute. It’s awkward at first, but soon the whisky dispels that and the laughs come easier, the silences stretch deeper. We watch the nights when our tribe cooked lamb in the northern gulch. When we scouted the highlands, listening to Quinn’s stories by the campfire. “We kissed that night,” Cassius says when Quinn finishes a story about her grandmother ’s fourth attempt to build a house in a mountain valley a hundred kilometers from civilization without an architect.
“She was climbing into her sleeping roll. I told her I heard a noise. We investigated. When she found out I was just throwing rocks into the dark to get her alone, she knew what I wanted. That smile.” He laughs. “Those legs. The kind meant to be wrapped around someone, you know what I mean?” He laughs. “But the lady did protest. Put her hand in my face, shoved me away.”
“Well, she wasn’t an easy one,” I say.
“No. But she did wake me up near morning to give me a kiss or two. On her terms, of course.”
“And that is the first time throwing stones has ever worked on a woman.”
“You’d be surprised.”
There’s moments I never knew existed. Roque and Cassius try to catch fish together only for Quinn
to push Cassius in from behind. He takes a deep drink beside me now as his younger self splashes in the water and tries to pull Quinn in. We watch private moments where Roque fell in love with Lea, where they scouted the highlands in the dark. Their hands brushing innocently together as they stop for water. Fitchner surveying them from a copse of trees, taking notes on his datapad. We watch the first time they sleep snuggled under the same blankets in the gate’s keep, and as Roque takes her off to the highlands to steal his first kiss only to hear boots on rocks and see Antonia and Vixus emerge from the mist, eyes glowing with optics.
They took Lea and when Roque fought, threw him off a cliff. He broke his arm and was swept down the river. By the time he returned, after three days of walking, I was supposedly dead by the Jackal’s hand. Roque