Morning Star by Pierce Brown
“Romulus…”
“No, Imperator Fabii. I do not believe you deserve the intimacy of using my given name any longer. You call Darrow a savage, a liar. But he came here wearing his heart on his sleeve. You came with the lies. Hiding behind manners and breeding…”
“ArchGovernor Raa, you must listen. There’s explanation if you will just…”
“Enough,” Romulus screams. Surging to his feet and slamming his large hand on the table. “Enough hypocrisy. Enough schemes. Enough lies you sniveling Core sycophant.” He trembles finally with the rage. “If you were not my guest, I would hurl my glove at you and cut your manhood away in the Bleeding Place. Your lost generation has forgotten what it means to be Gold. You have forsaken your heritage. Suckling at the tit of power, and why? For what? Those wings on your shoulders? Imperator.” He scoffs at the word. “You whelp. I pity a world where you decide if a man like Lorn au Arcos lives or dies. Did your parents never teach you?” They did not. Roque was raised by tutors, by books. “What is pride without honor? What is honor without truth? Honor is not what you say. It is not what you read.” Romulus thumps his chest. “Honor is what you do.”
“Then do not do this….” Roque says.
“Your master did this,” Romulus replies indifferently. “If she could not make us bow, she would make us burn. Again.”
Mustang tries and fails to keep the smile from her face as Roque watches the Moon Lords slip through his fingers. A darkness enters his cultured voice. One which leaves my heart in tatters. To think that voice once defended me. Now he guards something far less loving. A Society that cares nothing for him.
I always wondered why Fitchner selected Roque for House Mars. Until his betrayal I had known him to be only the most gentle soul. But now the Imperator shows his wrath.
“ArchGovernor Raa, listen to me carefully,” he says. “You are mistaken in believing we came here with intent to destroy you. We came to preserve the Society. Don’t give in to Darrow’s manipulation. You are better than that. Accept the Sovereign’s terms, and we may have peace for another thousand years. But if you choose this path, if you renege on our armistice, there will be no quarter. Your fleet is ragged. Darrow’s, wherever it hides, can be nothing more than a coalition of deserters in borrowed vessels.
“But we are the Sword Armada. We are the iron hand of the Legion and the fury of the Society. Our ships will darken the lights of your worlds. You know what I can do. You do not have a commander to match me. And when your ships burn, the knights of the Core will pour into your cities at the head flying columns and fill the air with ash enough to choke your children.
“If you betray your Color, the Compact, the Society—which is what this will be—Ilium will burn. I will acquaint you with ruin. I will hunt down every person you have ever known and I will exterminate their seed from the worlds. I will do so with a heavy heart. But I am a Man of Mars. A man of war. So know my wrath will be unending.” He extends a thin hand. The wolf of House Mars’ mouth is open in a silent, hungry howl. “Take my hand in kinship for the sake of your people and the sake of Gold. Or I will use it to build an age of peace upon the ashes of your house.”
Romulus walks around the edge of the table so that he is facing Roque, the younger man’s outstretched hand between them. Romulus draws his razor from where it is coiled on his hip. It rasps into rigid form. A blade etched with visions of Earth and of the Conquering. His family is as old as Mustang’s, as old as Octavia’s. He uses that blade to slice open his hand and suck the scarlet blood from the wound before drawing up and spitting it into Roque’s face.
“This is a bloodfeud. If ever again we meet, you are mine or I am yours, Fabii. If ever again we draw breath in the same room, one breath shall cease.” It is a formal, cold declaration that requires one thing of Roque. He nods. “Vela, see the Imperator to his shuttle. He has a fleet to prepare for battle.”
“Romulus, you can’t let him leave,” Mustang says. “He’s too dangerous.”
“I agree,” I say, but for another reason. I’d spare Roque from this battle. I do not want his blood on my hands. “Hold him prisoner until the battle is over, then release him unharmed.”
“This is my home,” Romulus says. “This is how we conduct ourselves. I promised him safe passage. He shall have it.”
Roque dabs the blood and spit away with the same napkin he used for the cheesecake and follows Vela away from the table toward the steps that lead back into the home. He pauses there before turning back to face us. I cannot say if he speaks to me or the Golds gathered but when he recites his last words, I know they are for the ages:
“Brothers, sisters, till the last
Woe that this has come to pass,
By your grave, I shall weep
For it was I who made you sleep.”
Roque bows minutely. “Thank you for the hospitality, ArchGovernor. I will see you shortly.” As Roque leaves the assembly, Romulus instructs Vela to hold him until I am safely off Io.
“Hail my Imperators and Praetors,” he tells one of his lancers. “I want them on holos in twenty minutes. We have a battle to plan. Darrow, if you would like to link in your Praetors…” But my mind is on Roque. I may never see him again. Never have a chance to say so many things which swarm my chest now. But so too do I know what letting him go could mean for my people.
“Go,” Mustang says, reading my eyes. I rise abruptly, excusing myself and manage to catch Roque as he finishes tying his boots in the garden. Vela and several others are moving him toward the iron gate.
“Roque.” He hesitates. Something in my voice causing him to turn and watch me approach. “When did I lose you?” I ask.
“When Quinn died,” he says.
“You planned to kill me even when you thought I was a Gold?”
“Gold. Red. It doesn’t matter. Your spirit is black. Quinn was good. Lea was good. And you used them. You are ruin, Darrow. You drain your friends of life, and leave them spent and wasted in your wake, convincing yourself each death is worth it. Each death brings you closer to justice. But history is littered with men like you. This Society is not without fault, but the hierarchy…this world, it is the best man can afford.”
“And it’s your right to decide that?”
“Yes. It is. But beat me in space, and it will be yours.”
Blood drips from Mustang’s hand.
The voices of children drift through the air.
“My son, my daughter, now that you bleed, you shall know no fear.” A young virgin girl with hair of white and feet bare on cold metal panels walks through the lines of kneeling giants carrying an iron dagger that drips with Aureate blood. “No defeat.”
Gold armor etched with deeds of their ancestors. The boy’s cloak innocent as snow. “Only victory.” She slices the already-injured hand of Romulus au Raa, whose eyes are closed, his dragon armor white and smooth as ivory as his other hand holds his eldest son’s hand. The boy is no older than seventeen, only just having won his year at the Ganymede Institute. His eyes are flashing and wild for the day. If only his intrepid young soul knew what waited on the other side of the hour. His older cousin kneels by his side, her hand on his knee. Her brother beside her. The family forming a chain across the bridge. “Your cowardice seeps from you.” Behind the girl, more children walk through the fold, carrying the four standards of Gold—a scepter, a sword, and a scroll crowned with a laurel. “Your rage burns bright.” She holds up the dripping dagger before Kavax au Telemanus and his youngest daughter Thraxa, a wild haired, freckle-faced, squat girl with her father’s laugh and Pax’s simple kindness. “Rise, children of Ilium, warriors of Gold, and take with you your Color’s might.”
Two hundred Gold Praetors and Legates rise. Mustang and Romulus at their head, flanked by the Telemanuses and House Arcos. Mustang lifts up her hand and smears the blood upon her own face. Two hundred killers join her, but I do not. I watch from the corner with Sefi as the combined officer corps of my Gold allies honors their Ancestors. Martian Refor
mers, Rim tyrants, old friends, old enemies clutter the bridge of Mustang’s flagship, the two-hundred-year-old dreadnought Dejah Thoris.
“The battle today is to decide the fate of our Society. Whether we live under the rule of a tyrant or whether we carve our own destiny.” Mustang catalogues the list of enemies for the day’s hunt. “Roque au Fabii, Scipia au Falthe, Antonia au Severus-Julii, Cyriana au Tanus.” Thistle. “These are wanted lives.”
I’ve been here before, witnessing this benediction, and I can’t help but feel I will be here again. It has lost none of its luster. None of the grandeur that so sheathes this remarkable people. They go to death not for the Vale, not for love, but for glory. We have never seen a race quite like them, nor will we again. After months surrounded by the Sons of Ares I see these Golds less as demons than falling angels. Precious, flaring so brilliantly across the sky before disappearing beyond the horizon.
But how many more days like this can they afford?
In the halls of our enemies, Roque will be reciting our names, and the names of my friends. He who kills the Reaper will have glory unending, bounty and renown. Young beasts with wide shoulders and angry eyes straight from the halls of the Core’s schools will hunt me. Ready to make their name.
So too will the old Gray legionnaires hunt me. Those who see my rebellion as the great threat against mother Society. Against that union which they have loved and fought for their entire lives. And Obsidian will seek me, led by masters who promised them Pinks in exchange for my head. They will hunt my friends. They will say Sevro’s name, and Mustang’s, and Ragnar’s because they do not yet know he is gone from us. They will hunt the Telemanuses and Victra, Orion, and my Howlers. But they cannot have them. Not today.
Today I take.
I stand looking down at my Gold allies. I am encased in militarized metal. Two point one meters tall, one hundred and sixty kilograms of death in a pulseArmor suit of blood-red. My slingblade is coiled around my right vambrace just above the wrist. A gravFist on my left hand. Built for collisions in corridors today, not speed. Sefi is just as monstrous as I in her brother’s armor. Hate in her eyes seeing this host of enemies.
My allies needed to see her. To see me. To know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Reaper is more alive than ever. Many of the Martians fell with me in the Rain. Some look at me with hate. Others with curiosity. And some—a very few—salute. But from most there’s a contempt that will never be washed away. That’s why I brought Sefi. Absent love, fear will do nicely in a pinch.
Upon hearing news that Roque’s fleet has begun its journey from Europa, I make my farewell to Romulus and his coterie of Praetors who helped devise our battle plan. Romulus’s handshake is firm. Respect between us, but no love. In the hangar, I say goodbye to Mustang and the Telemanuses. The floor vibrates as shuttles ferry the hundreds of Peerless back to their ships. “It seems like we’re always saying farewell,” I say to Kavax after he says his goodbyes to Mustang, lifting her up easy as he might a little doll and kissing her head.
“Farewell? It is not farewell,” he rumbles with a toothy grin. “Win today and it becomes just a long hello. Much life left for the both of us, I think.”
“I don’t know how to thank you,” I say.
“What for?” Kavax asks, confused, as per usual.
“The kindness…” I don’t know how else to say it. “For watching over my friends when I’m not even one of you.”
“One of us?” His ruddy face smirks. “A fool. You speak like a fool. My boy made you one of us.” He looks across the hangar where Mustang speaks with one of Lorn’s daughters-in-law near a transport. “She makes you one of us.” It’s all I can do to keep the tears from my eyes. “And if we damn all that, I say you’re one of us. So one of us you are.”
He lets Sophocles down from his shoulder perch to lope onto the floor. Circling, the fox jumps up onto my leg to dig something out of a joint in my armor. A jellybean. Thraxa puts a finger to her lips behind her father. The big man’s eyes light up. “What fresh deliciousness is this, Sophocles? Oh, your favorite kind! Watermelon.” The fox returns, jumping up onto his shoulder. “See! You have his benediction as well.”
“Thank you, Sophocles,” I say, reaching to scratch him behind the ears.
Kavax slams me into a hug before departing. “Take care, Reaper.” He trundles up the ramp. “Fishing?” he booms down at me before he’s gone ten meters.
“What?”
“Do Reds fish?”
“I never have.”
“There is a river through my estate on Mars. We will go, you and I, when this is done and sit by the bank and toss our lines and I will teach you how to tell a pike from a trout.”
“I’ll bring the whiskey,” I say.
He points a finger at me. “Yes! And we will be drunk together. Yes!” He disappears into the ship, throwing his arm around Thraxa and calling to his other daughters about a miracle he just witnessed. “I think he might be the luckiest of us,” I say as Mustang comes up from behind me to watch the Telemanus ship depart.
“Is it ridiculous if I ask you to be careful?” she asks.
“I promise not to do anything rash,” I reply with a wink. “I’ll have the Valkyrie with me. I doubt anyone will want to tangle with us for long.” She glances over my shoulder to where Sefi waits by my own shuttle, admiring the engines of other ships as they fly away. Mustang looks like she wants to say something, but is wrestling with how.
“You’re not invincible.” She touches the armor of my chest. “Some of us might want you around after all of this. After all, what’s the point of all this if you go and die on me? You hear?”
“I hear.”
“Do you?” She looks up at me. “I don’t want to be left alone again. So come back.” She raps her knuckles on my chest and turns to go to her ship.
“Mustang.” I chase after her and grab her arm, pulling her back toward me. Before she can say anything, I kiss her there surrounded by metal and engine roar. Not some delicate kiss, but a hungry one, where I pull her head to mine and feel the woman beneath the weight of duty. Her body presses against me. And I feel the shudder of fear that this will be the last time. Our lips part and I sink into her, rocking there, smelling her hair and gasping at the tightness in my chest. “I’ll see you soon.”
I pace my bridge like a caged wolf, his meal just beyond the bars. The kindness of me hidden again behind the Reaper’s savage face. “Virga, are the Howlers in position?” I ask. Behind and below me, the skeleton crew of Blues chatter in their sterile pit. Faces illuminated by holoscreens. Subdermal implants pulsing as they sync with the ship. The captain, Pelus, a waifish gentleman who was a former lieutenant aboard the Pax when I first took the ship, awaits my orders.
“Yes, sir,” Virga says from her station. “Forward elements of the enemy fleet will be within long-range guns in four minutes.”
The arrogant might of Gold unfolds across the black of space. An unending sea of pale white splinters. I’d give anything to be able to reach out and shatter them. My own capital ships cluster in three groups around our powerful dreadnoughts above the north pole of Io. Mustang and Romulus marshal their forces around the south. And together, eight thousand kilometers apart, we watch Roque’s fleet cross the void between Europa and Io to bring us battle.
“Enemy cruisers at ten thousand kilometers,” a Blue intones.
There is no preamble for my fleet. No benediction or rite that we perform before battle like the Golds. For all our right, we seem so pale and simple compared with them. But there’s a kinship here on my ship. One I saw in the engine rooms, in the gunnery stations, on the bridge. A dream that links us together and makes us brave.
“Give me Orion,” I say without turning.
A holo of the overweight, ornery Blue ripples into life in front of me. She’s half a hundred kilometers away in the heart of Persephone’s Howl, one of my other four dreadnoughts, sitting in a command chair synced with every ship captain in my fleet save
those of my strike force. Much of today relies upon her and the pirate fleet she’s assembled in the months since last we saw one another. She’s been raiding Core shipping lines. Drawing Blues to her cause. Enough to help the Sons staff the ships we stole from the Jackal with loyal men and women.
“Big fleet,” Orion says of our enemy, impressed. “I knew I never should have answered your call. I was rather enjoying being a pirate.”
“I can tell,” I say. “Your stateroom’s gaudy enough to a make a Silver blush.” The Pax has been her home for the last year and a half. She took over my old quarters and filled it right up with the booty of her raids. Rugs from Venus. Paintings from private Gold collections. I found a Titian jammed behind a bookcase.
“What can I say? I like pretty things.”
“Well, pull this off today, and I’ll find you a parrot for your shoulder. How about that?”
“Ah! Pelus told you I was looking for one. Good man, Pelus.” The waifish captain tilts his head genteelly behind me. “Damn hard to find parrots when you can’t dock planetside anywhere. We found a hawk, a dove, an owl. But no parrot. If you make it a red one I’ll personally shoot a hole in Antonia au Severus-Julii’s bridge.”
“Red parrot it is,” I say.
“Good. Good. I suppose now I should go be about the battle.” She laughs to herself and takes a tea from a valet on her bridge. “Just want to say, thank you, Darrow. For believing in me. For giving me this. After today, Blue will have no master. Goodspeed, boy.”
“Goodspeed, Admiral.”
She vanishes. I glance back at the central sensor projection. The tactical readout floats before the windows as a to-scale globe of the Jupiter system. Four tiny inner moons orbit Jupiter more closely than the four huge Galilean Moons. My eyes focus on Thebe, the outermost of them and closest to Io. It’s a small mass. Barely larger than Phobos. Long since mined for valuable minerals, and now the home of a military base that was blasted apart in the early days of the war.
“No, Imperator Fabii. I do not believe you deserve the intimacy of using my given name any longer. You call Darrow a savage, a liar. But he came here wearing his heart on his sleeve. You came with the lies. Hiding behind manners and breeding…”
“ArchGovernor Raa, you must listen. There’s explanation if you will just…”
“Enough,” Romulus screams. Surging to his feet and slamming his large hand on the table. “Enough hypocrisy. Enough schemes. Enough lies you sniveling Core sycophant.” He trembles finally with the rage. “If you were not my guest, I would hurl my glove at you and cut your manhood away in the Bleeding Place. Your lost generation has forgotten what it means to be Gold. You have forsaken your heritage. Suckling at the tit of power, and why? For what? Those wings on your shoulders? Imperator.” He scoffs at the word. “You whelp. I pity a world where you decide if a man like Lorn au Arcos lives or dies. Did your parents never teach you?” They did not. Roque was raised by tutors, by books. “What is pride without honor? What is honor without truth? Honor is not what you say. It is not what you read.” Romulus thumps his chest. “Honor is what you do.”
“Then do not do this….” Roque says.
“Your master did this,” Romulus replies indifferently. “If she could not make us bow, she would make us burn. Again.”
Mustang tries and fails to keep the smile from her face as Roque watches the Moon Lords slip through his fingers. A darkness enters his cultured voice. One which leaves my heart in tatters. To think that voice once defended me. Now he guards something far less loving. A Society that cares nothing for him.
I always wondered why Fitchner selected Roque for House Mars. Until his betrayal I had known him to be only the most gentle soul. But now the Imperator shows his wrath.
“ArchGovernor Raa, listen to me carefully,” he says. “You are mistaken in believing we came here with intent to destroy you. We came to preserve the Society. Don’t give in to Darrow’s manipulation. You are better than that. Accept the Sovereign’s terms, and we may have peace for another thousand years. But if you choose this path, if you renege on our armistice, there will be no quarter. Your fleet is ragged. Darrow’s, wherever it hides, can be nothing more than a coalition of deserters in borrowed vessels.
“But we are the Sword Armada. We are the iron hand of the Legion and the fury of the Society. Our ships will darken the lights of your worlds. You know what I can do. You do not have a commander to match me. And when your ships burn, the knights of the Core will pour into your cities at the head flying columns and fill the air with ash enough to choke your children.
“If you betray your Color, the Compact, the Society—which is what this will be—Ilium will burn. I will acquaint you with ruin. I will hunt down every person you have ever known and I will exterminate their seed from the worlds. I will do so with a heavy heart. But I am a Man of Mars. A man of war. So know my wrath will be unending.” He extends a thin hand. The wolf of House Mars’ mouth is open in a silent, hungry howl. “Take my hand in kinship for the sake of your people and the sake of Gold. Or I will use it to build an age of peace upon the ashes of your house.”
Romulus walks around the edge of the table so that he is facing Roque, the younger man’s outstretched hand between them. Romulus draws his razor from where it is coiled on his hip. It rasps into rigid form. A blade etched with visions of Earth and of the Conquering. His family is as old as Mustang’s, as old as Octavia’s. He uses that blade to slice open his hand and suck the scarlet blood from the wound before drawing up and spitting it into Roque’s face.
“This is a bloodfeud. If ever again we meet, you are mine or I am yours, Fabii. If ever again we draw breath in the same room, one breath shall cease.” It is a formal, cold declaration that requires one thing of Roque. He nods. “Vela, see the Imperator to his shuttle. He has a fleet to prepare for battle.”
“Romulus, you can’t let him leave,” Mustang says. “He’s too dangerous.”
“I agree,” I say, but for another reason. I’d spare Roque from this battle. I do not want his blood on my hands. “Hold him prisoner until the battle is over, then release him unharmed.”
“This is my home,” Romulus says. “This is how we conduct ourselves. I promised him safe passage. He shall have it.”
Roque dabs the blood and spit away with the same napkin he used for the cheesecake and follows Vela away from the table toward the steps that lead back into the home. He pauses there before turning back to face us. I cannot say if he speaks to me or the Golds gathered but when he recites his last words, I know they are for the ages:
“Brothers, sisters, till the last
Woe that this has come to pass,
By your grave, I shall weep
For it was I who made you sleep.”
Roque bows minutely. “Thank you for the hospitality, ArchGovernor. I will see you shortly.” As Roque leaves the assembly, Romulus instructs Vela to hold him until I am safely off Io.
“Hail my Imperators and Praetors,” he tells one of his lancers. “I want them on holos in twenty minutes. We have a battle to plan. Darrow, if you would like to link in your Praetors…” But my mind is on Roque. I may never see him again. Never have a chance to say so many things which swarm my chest now. But so too do I know what letting him go could mean for my people.
“Go,” Mustang says, reading my eyes. I rise abruptly, excusing myself and manage to catch Roque as he finishes tying his boots in the garden. Vela and several others are moving him toward the iron gate.
“Roque.” He hesitates. Something in my voice causing him to turn and watch me approach. “When did I lose you?” I ask.
“When Quinn died,” he says.
“You planned to kill me even when you thought I was a Gold?”
“Gold. Red. It doesn’t matter. Your spirit is black. Quinn was good. Lea was good. And you used them. You are ruin, Darrow. You drain your friends of life, and leave them spent and wasted in your wake, convincing yourself each death is worth it. Each death brings you closer to justice. But history is littered with men like you. This Society is not without fault, but the hierarchy…this world, it is the best man can afford.”
“And it’s your right to decide that?”
“Yes. It is. But beat me in space, and it will be yours.”
Blood drips from Mustang’s hand.
The voices of children drift through the air.
“My son, my daughter, now that you bleed, you shall know no fear.” A young virgin girl with hair of white and feet bare on cold metal panels walks through the lines of kneeling giants carrying an iron dagger that drips with Aureate blood. “No defeat.”
Gold armor etched with deeds of their ancestors. The boy’s cloak innocent as snow. “Only victory.” She slices the already-injured hand of Romulus au Raa, whose eyes are closed, his dragon armor white and smooth as ivory as his other hand holds his eldest son’s hand. The boy is no older than seventeen, only just having won his year at the Ganymede Institute. His eyes are flashing and wild for the day. If only his intrepid young soul knew what waited on the other side of the hour. His older cousin kneels by his side, her hand on his knee. Her brother beside her. The family forming a chain across the bridge. “Your cowardice seeps from you.” Behind the girl, more children walk through the fold, carrying the four standards of Gold—a scepter, a sword, and a scroll crowned with a laurel. “Your rage burns bright.” She holds up the dripping dagger before Kavax au Telemanus and his youngest daughter Thraxa, a wild haired, freckle-faced, squat girl with her father’s laugh and Pax’s simple kindness. “Rise, children of Ilium, warriors of Gold, and take with you your Color’s might.”
Two hundred Gold Praetors and Legates rise. Mustang and Romulus at their head, flanked by the Telemanuses and House Arcos. Mustang lifts up her hand and smears the blood upon her own face. Two hundred killers join her, but I do not. I watch from the corner with Sefi as the combined officer corps of my Gold allies honors their Ancestors. Martian Refor
“The battle today is to decide the fate of our Society. Whether we live under the rule of a tyrant or whether we carve our own destiny.” Mustang catalogues the list of enemies for the day’s hunt. “Roque au Fabii, Scipia au Falthe, Antonia au Severus-Julii, Cyriana au Tanus.” Thistle. “These are wanted lives.”
I’ve been here before, witnessing this benediction, and I can’t help but feel I will be here again. It has lost none of its luster. None of the grandeur that so sheathes this remarkable people. They go to death not for the Vale, not for love, but for glory. We have never seen a race quite like them, nor will we again. After months surrounded by the Sons of Ares I see these Golds less as demons than falling angels. Precious, flaring so brilliantly across the sky before disappearing beyond the horizon.
But how many more days like this can they afford?
In the halls of our enemies, Roque will be reciting our names, and the names of my friends. He who kills the Reaper will have glory unending, bounty and renown. Young beasts with wide shoulders and angry eyes straight from the halls of the Core’s schools will hunt me. Ready to make their name.
So too will the old Gray legionnaires hunt me. Those who see my rebellion as the great threat against mother Society. Against that union which they have loved and fought for their entire lives. And Obsidian will seek me, led by masters who promised them Pinks in exchange for my head. They will hunt my friends. They will say Sevro’s name, and Mustang’s, and Ragnar’s because they do not yet know he is gone from us. They will hunt the Telemanuses and Victra, Orion, and my Howlers. But they cannot have them. Not today.
Today I take.
I stand looking down at my Gold allies. I am encased in militarized metal. Two point one meters tall, one hundred and sixty kilograms of death in a pulseArmor suit of blood-red. My slingblade is coiled around my right vambrace just above the wrist. A gravFist on my left hand. Built for collisions in corridors today, not speed. Sefi is just as monstrous as I in her brother’s armor. Hate in her eyes seeing this host of enemies.
My allies needed to see her. To see me. To know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Reaper is more alive than ever. Many of the Martians fell with me in the Rain. Some look at me with hate. Others with curiosity. And some—a very few—salute. But from most there’s a contempt that will never be washed away. That’s why I brought Sefi. Absent love, fear will do nicely in a pinch.
Upon hearing news that Roque’s fleet has begun its journey from Europa, I make my farewell to Romulus and his coterie of Praetors who helped devise our battle plan. Romulus’s handshake is firm. Respect between us, but no love. In the hangar, I say goodbye to Mustang and the Telemanuses. The floor vibrates as shuttles ferry the hundreds of Peerless back to their ships. “It seems like we’re always saying farewell,” I say to Kavax after he says his goodbyes to Mustang, lifting her up easy as he might a little doll and kissing her head.
“Farewell? It is not farewell,” he rumbles with a toothy grin. “Win today and it becomes just a long hello. Much life left for the both of us, I think.”
“I don’t know how to thank you,” I say.
“What for?” Kavax asks, confused, as per usual.
“The kindness…” I don’t know how else to say it. “For watching over my friends when I’m not even one of you.”
“One of us?” His ruddy face smirks. “A fool. You speak like a fool. My boy made you one of us.” He looks across the hangar where Mustang speaks with one of Lorn’s daughters-in-law near a transport. “She makes you one of us.” It’s all I can do to keep the tears from my eyes. “And if we damn all that, I say you’re one of us. So one of us you are.”
He lets Sophocles down from his shoulder perch to lope onto the floor. Circling, the fox jumps up onto my leg to dig something out of a joint in my armor. A jellybean. Thraxa puts a finger to her lips behind her father. The big man’s eyes light up. “What fresh deliciousness is this, Sophocles? Oh, your favorite kind! Watermelon.” The fox returns, jumping up onto his shoulder. “See! You have his benediction as well.”
“Thank you, Sophocles,” I say, reaching to scratch him behind the ears.
Kavax slams me into a hug before departing. “Take care, Reaper.” He trundles up the ramp. “Fishing?” he booms down at me before he’s gone ten meters.
“What?”
“Do Reds fish?”
“I never have.”
“There is a river through my estate on Mars. We will go, you and I, when this is done and sit by the bank and toss our lines and I will teach you how to tell a pike from a trout.”
“I’ll bring the whiskey,” I say.
He points a finger at me. “Yes! And we will be drunk together. Yes!” He disappears into the ship, throwing his arm around Thraxa and calling to his other daughters about a miracle he just witnessed. “I think he might be the luckiest of us,” I say as Mustang comes up from behind me to watch the Telemanus ship depart.
“Is it ridiculous if I ask you to be careful?” she asks.
“I promise not to do anything rash,” I reply with a wink. “I’ll have the Valkyrie with me. I doubt anyone will want to tangle with us for long.” She glances over my shoulder to where Sefi waits by my own shuttle, admiring the engines of other ships as they fly away. Mustang looks like she wants to say something, but is wrestling with how.
“You’re not invincible.” She touches the armor of my chest. “Some of us might want you around after all of this. After all, what’s the point of all this if you go and die on me? You hear?”
“I hear.”
“Do you?” She looks up at me. “I don’t want to be left alone again. So come back.” She raps her knuckles on my chest and turns to go to her ship.
“Mustang.” I chase after her and grab her arm, pulling her back toward me. Before she can say anything, I kiss her there surrounded by metal and engine roar. Not some delicate kiss, but a hungry one, where I pull her head to mine and feel the woman beneath the weight of duty. Her body presses against me. And I feel the shudder of fear that this will be the last time. Our lips part and I sink into her, rocking there, smelling her hair and gasping at the tightness in my chest. “I’ll see you soon.”
I pace my bridge like a caged wolf, his meal just beyond the bars. The kindness of me hidden again behind the Reaper’s savage face. “Virga, are the Howlers in position?” I ask. Behind and below me, the skeleton crew of Blues chatter in their sterile pit. Faces illuminated by holoscreens. Subdermal implants pulsing as they sync with the ship. The captain, Pelus, a waifish gentleman who was a former lieutenant aboard the Pax when I first took the ship, awaits my orders.
“Yes, sir,” Virga says from her station. “Forward elements of the enemy fleet will be within long-range guns in four minutes.”
The arrogant might of Gold unfolds across the black of space. An unending sea of pale white splinters. I’d give anything to be able to reach out and shatter them. My own capital ships cluster in three groups around our powerful dreadnoughts above the north pole of Io. Mustang and Romulus marshal their forces around the south. And together, eight thousand kilometers apart, we watch Roque’s fleet cross the void between Europa and Io to bring us battle.
“Enemy cruisers at ten thousand kilometers,” a Blue intones.
There is no preamble for my fleet. No benediction or rite that we perform before battle like the Golds. For all our right, we seem so pale and simple compared with them. But there’s a kinship here on my ship. One I saw in the engine rooms, in the gunnery stations, on the bridge. A dream that links us together and makes us brave.
“Give me Orion,” I say without turning.
A holo of the overweight, ornery Blue ripples into life in front of me. She’s half a hundred kilometers away in the heart of Persephone’s Howl, one of my other four dreadnoughts, sitting in a command chair synced with every ship captain in my fleet save
“Big fleet,” Orion says of our enemy, impressed. “I knew I never should have answered your call. I was rather enjoying being a pirate.”
“I can tell,” I say. “Your stateroom’s gaudy enough to a make a Silver blush.” The Pax has been her home for the last year and a half. She took over my old quarters and filled it right up with the booty of her raids. Rugs from Venus. Paintings from private Gold collections. I found a Titian jammed behind a bookcase.
“What can I say? I like pretty things.”
“Well, pull this off today, and I’ll find you a parrot for your shoulder. How about that?”
“Ah! Pelus told you I was looking for one. Good man, Pelus.” The waifish captain tilts his head genteelly behind me. “Damn hard to find parrots when you can’t dock planetside anywhere. We found a hawk, a dove, an owl. But no parrot. If you make it a red one I’ll personally shoot a hole in Antonia au Severus-Julii’s bridge.”
“Red parrot it is,” I say.
“Good. Good. I suppose now I should go be about the battle.” She laughs to herself and takes a tea from a valet on her bridge. “Just want to say, thank you, Darrow. For believing in me. For giving me this. After today, Blue will have no master. Goodspeed, boy.”
“Goodspeed, Admiral.”
She vanishes. I glance back at the central sensor projection. The tactical readout floats before the windows as a to-scale globe of the Jupiter system. Four tiny inner moons orbit Jupiter more closely than the four huge Galilean Moons. My eyes focus on Thebe, the outermost of them and closest to Io. It’s a small mass. Barely larger than Phobos. Long since mined for valuable minerals, and now the home of a military base that was blasted apart in the early days of the war.