Morning Star

“Our Society is at war…” Dancer tells me in the Sons of Ares command room. The facility is domed, skinned in rock and illuminated by pale bluish lights above, and a corona of computer terminals that glow around a central holographic display. He stands to the side of the display drenched in the blue light of Mars’s Thermic Sea. With us is Ragnar, several older Sons I don’t recognize, and Theodora, who greeted me with the graceful kiss on the lips popular in Luna’s highColor circles. Elegant even in black utility pants, she has an air of authority in the room. Like my Howlers, she was not invited by Augustus to the garden after the Triumph. Not important enough, thank Jove. Sevro sent Pebble to get her out of the Citadel as soon as it all went down. She’s been with the Sons ever since, helping Dancer’s propaganda and intelligence wings.

“…Not just the Rising against Gold forces here and our other cells across the System. But among Gold itself. After they killed Arcos and Augustus, as well as their staunchest supporters at your Triumph, Roque and the Jackal made a coordinated play to seize the navy in orbit. They feared Virginia or the Telemanuses would rally the ships of the Golds murdered in the garden. Virginia did, not just with her father’s own ships, but with those of Arcos, under the command of three of his daughters-in-law. It came to battle around Deimos. And Roque’s fleet, even outnumbered, crushed Mustang’s and sent them into flight.”

“She’s alive, then,” I say, knowing they’re wary of how I’d react to knowing the information.

“Yeah,” Sevro says, watching me carefully, as do the rest. “Far as we know, she’s alive.” Ragnar seems about to say something, but Sevro cuts him off. “Dancer, show him Jupiter.”

My eyes linger on Ragnar as Dancer waves his hand and the holographic display warps to show the great marbled gas giant of Jupiter. Surrounding it are the sixty-three smaller asteroidlike satellites and the four great moons of Jupiter—Europa, Io, Ganymede, and Calisto.

“The purge instituted by the Jackal and Sovereign was an impressive operation that spanned not just the thirty assassinations of the garden, but over three hundred other assassinations across the Solar System. Most carried out by Olympic Knights or Praetorians. It was proposed and designed by the Jackal to eliminate the Sovereign’s key enemies on Mars, but also Luna and throughout the Society. It worked well, very well. But one grand mistake was made. In the garden, they killed Revus au Raa and his nine-year-old granddaughter.”

“The ArchGovernor of Io,” I say. “Sending a message to the Moon Lords?”

“Yes, but it backfired. A week after the Triumph, the children of the Moon Lords whom the Sovereign keeps on Luna as wards to ransom their parents’ loyalty escaped. Two days after that, the heirs of Raa stole the entirety of Classis Saturnus. The whole Eighth fleet garrison in its dock at Calisto with the help of the Cordovans of Ganymede.

“The Raas declared Io’s independence for the Moons of Jupiter, their new alliance with Virginia au Augustus and the heirs of Arcos, and their war on the Sovereign.”

“A Second Moon Rebellion. Sixty years after the burning of Rhea,” I say with a slow smile, thinking of Mustang at the head of an entire planetary system. Even if she left me, even if there’s that hollowness in the pit of my stomach when I think of her, this is good news for us. We’re not the Sovereign’s sole enemy. “Did Uranus and Saturn join? Neptune surely did.”

“All did.”

“All? Then there’s hope….” I say.

“Yeah, you’d think. Right?” Sevro mutters.

Dancer explains. “The Moon Lords also made a mistake. They expected the Sovereign would find herself mired on Mars and would be plagued with lowColor insurrection in the Core. So they assumed she would not be able to send a fleet of sufficient size six hundred million kilometers to quash their rebellion for at least three years.”

“And they were dead wrong,” Sevro mutters. “The idiots. Got caught with their panties down.”

“How long did it take for her to send a fleet?” I ask. “Six months?”

“Sixty-three days.”

“That’s impossible, the logistics on fuel alone…” My voice trails away as I remember the Ash Lord was on the way to reinforce House Bellona in orbit around Mars before we took the planet. He was weeks away then. He must have continued out to the Rim, following Mustang the entire way.

“You should know better than anyone the efficiency of the Society Navy. They’re a war machine,” Dancer says. “Logistics and systems of operation are perfect. The longer the Rim had to prepare, the harder it would have been for the Sovereign to wage a campaign. The Sovereign knew that. So the whole Sword Armada deployed straightaway to Jupiter orbit, and they’ve been there for nearly ten months.”

“Roque did a nasty,” Sevro says. “Snuck ahead of the main fleet and jacked that moonBreaker old Nero tried to steal last year.”

“He stole a moonBreaker.”

“Yeah. I know. He’s named it the Colossus and chosen it as his flagship. The ponce. It’s a nasty piece of hardware. Makes the Pax look tiny by comparison.”

The holo above shows the Sovereign’s fleet coming upon Jupiter, where the moonBreaker waits to welcome them. The days and weeks and months of war speed past.

“The scope of it…is manic,” Sevro says. “Each fleet twice again as large as the coalition you summoned to pound the Bellona…” He says more, but I’m lost watching the months of war speed past, realizing how the worlds kept turning without me.

“Octavia wouldn’t have used the Ash Lord,” I say distantly. “If he even went past the asteroid belt, there would be no reconciliation. The Rim would never surrender. So who leads them? Aja?”

“Roque au Buttsucking Fabii,” Sevro sneers.

“He leads the entire fleet?” I ask in surprise.

“I know, right? After the Siege of Mars and the Battle of Deimos, he’s a bloodydamn godchild to the Core. Regular Iron Gold pulled from annals past. Never mind you snuck in under his nose. Or he was a joke at the Institute. He’s good at three things. Whining, stabbing people in the back, and destroying fleets.”

“They call him the Poet of Deimos,” Ragnar says. “He is undefeated in battle. Even against Mustang and her titans. He is very dangerous.”

“Fleet warfare is not her game,” I say. Mustang can fight. But she’s always been more a political creature. She binds people together. But raw tactics? That’s Roque’s province.

The warlord in me mourns having been kept away for so long. For having missed such a spectacle as that of the Second Moon Rebellion. Sixty-seven moons, most militarized, four with populations more than one hundred million. Fleet battles. Orbital bombardments. Asteroid hopping assault maneuvers with armies in mech suits. It would have been my playground. But the man in me knows if I hadn’t been in the box, this room would be missing people.

I realize I’m internalizing too much. I force myself to communicate.

“We’re running out of time. Aren’t we?”

Dancer nods. “Last week, Roque took Calisto. Only Ganymede and Io hold strong. If the Moon Lords capitulate then that navy and the Legions with it return here to aid the Jackal against us. We will be the sole focus of the united military might of the Society, and they will eradicate us.”

That was why Fitchner hated bombs. They bring the eyes, wake the giant.

“So what about Mars? What about our war? Hell, what is our war?”

“It’s a bloodydamn mess is what it is,” Sevro says. “It spilled over into open war about eight months ago. The Sons have stayed tight. Don’t know where Orion is. Dead, we reckon. The Pax and your ships are gone. And now we’ve got paramilitary armies that aren’t Sons-affiliated rising up in the north, massacring civilians and in turn getting wiped out by Legion airborne units. Then there’s mass strikes and protests in dozens of cities. The prisons are overflowing with political prisoners, so they’re relocating them to these makeshift camps where we know for a fact that they are pullin’ mass executions.”

Dancer pulls up some of the holos, so I see blurry images of what look like large prisons in the desert and forest. They zoom in on lowColors disembarking transports at gunpoint and filing into the concrete structures. It switches to a view of rubble-strewn streets. Men with masks and Red armbands firing over the smoking remains of city trams. A Gold lands among them. The image cuts out.

“We been hitting them hard as we can,” Sevro says. “Gotten some hardcore business done. Stole a dozen ships, two destroyers. Demolished the Thermic Command Center…”

“And now they’re rebuilding it,” Dancer says.

“Then we’ll destroy it again,” Sevro snaps.

“When we can’t even hold a city?”

“These Reds are not warriors.” Ragnar interrupts the two. “They can fly ships. Shoot guns. Lay bombs. Fight Grays. But when a Gold arrives, they melt away.”

A deep silence follows his words. The Sons of Ares are guerilla fighters. Saboteurs. Spies. But in this war, Lorn’s words haunt me. “How do sheep kill a lion? By drowning him in blood.”

“Every civilian death on Mars is blamed on us,” Theodora says eventually. “We kill two in a bombing of a munitions manufacturing plant, they say we killed a thousand. Every strike or demonstration, Society agents infiltrate the crowd masquerading as demonstrators to shoot at Gray officers or detonate suicide vests. Those images are dispersed to the media circus. And when the cameras are off, Grays break into homes and make sympathizers disappear. MidColors. LowColor. Doesn’t matter. They contain the dissent. In the north, like Sevro said, it’s open rebellion.”

“A faction called Red Legion is massacring every highColor they find,” Dancer says darkly. “Old friend of ours has joined their leadership. Harmony.”

“Fitting.”

“She’s poisoned them against us. They won’t take our orders, and we’ve stopped sending them weapons. We’re losing our moral high ground.”

“The man with voice and violence controls the world,” I murmur.

“Arcos?” Theodora asks. I nod. “If only he were here.”

“I’m not sure he’d help us.”

“Lamentably, it seems as if voice doesn’t exist without violence,” the Pink says. She folds a leg over the other. “The greatest weapon a rebellion has is its spiritus. The spirit of change. That little seed that finds a hope in the mind and flourishes and spreads. But the ability to plant that idea, and even the idea itself has been taken from us. The message stolen. We are voiceless.”

When she speaks, the others listen. Not to humor her like Golds would, but as if her position was nearly equal to Dancer’s.

“None of this makes any sense,” I say. “What sparked open war? The Jackal didn’t publicize killing Fitchner. He would have wanted it quiet as he purged the Sons. What was the catalyst? And also, you say we’re voiceless. But Fitchner had a communication network that could broadcast to the mines, to anywhere. He pushed Eo’s death to the masses. Made her the face of the Rising. Did the Jackal take it out?” I look around at their concerned faces. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“You didn’t tell him already?” Sevro asks. “The hell were you doing when I was gone, picking your asses?”

“Darrow wanted to be with his family,” Dancer says sharply. He turns to me with a sigh. “Much of our digital network was destroyed during the Jackal’s purges in the month after Ares was killed and you were captured. Sevro was able to warn us before the Jackal’s men hit our base in Agea. We went to ground, saved materiel, but lost massive amounts of manpower. Thousands of Sons. Trained operators. The next three months we spent trying to find you. We hijacked a transport going to Luna, but you weren’t on it. We searched the prisons. Issued bribes. But you’d disappeared, like you never existed. And then the Jackal executed you on the steps of the citadel in Agea.”

“I know all this.”

“Well, what you don’t know is what Sevro did next.”

I look to my friend. “What did you do?”

“What I had to.” He takes control of the hologram and wipes Jupiter away, replacing it with me. Sixteen years old. Scrawny and pale and naked on a table as Mickey stands over me with his buzzsaw. A chill trickles down my spine. But it’s not even my spine. Not really. It belongs to these people. To the revolution. I feel…used as I realize what he’s done.

“You released it.”

“Damn right,” Sevro says nastily, and I feel all their eyes settling on me, now understanding why my blade is painted on the roofs of Tinos’s refugees. They all know I was once a Red. They know one of their own conquered Mars in an Iron Rain.

I started the war.

“I released your Carving to every mine. To every holoSite. To every millimeter of this bloodydamn Society. The Golds thought they could kill you off. That they could beat you and make your death mean nothing. I’ll be damned if I’d let that happen.” He thumps his hand on a table. “Damned if I’d let you disappear facelessly into the machine like my mother. There’s not a Red on Mars that doesn’t know your name, Reap. Not a single person in the digital world who doesn’t know that a Red rose to become a prince of the Golds, to conquer Mars. I made you a myth. And now that you’re back from the dead, you’re not just a martyr. You’re the bloodydamn messiah the Reds have been waiting for their entire lives.”