Morning Star

Sevro and I stalk back into the ready room where the Howlers are packed and prepared to depart the station. Rollo and a dozen of his people watch us tensely from their side of the room. They know they’re about to be abandoned. Quicksilver follows behind me, restraints left behind in his cell. He’s agreed to our plan, with a few adjustments. “Well, look at this….” Victra says, seeing our bruises and bloody knuckles. “You two finally talked.” She looks to Ragnar. “See?”

“Shit’s sorted,” Sevro says.

“And the rich man?” Ragnar asks curiously. “He wears no manacles.”

“That’s because he’s a Son of Ares, Rags,” Sevro says. “Didn’t you know?”

“Quicksilver’s a Son?” Victra explodes into laughter. “And I’m secretly a Helldiver.” She looks back and forth at our faces. “Wait…you’re serious. Do you have proof?”

“I’m sorry to hear of your mother, Victra,” Quicksilver says hoarsely. “But it is a pleasure to see you walking, truly. I’ve been with the Sons for over twenty years. I have hundreds of hours of conversations with Fitchner to prove it.”

“He’s a Son,” Sevro says. “Can we move on?”

“Well, I’ll be damned.” Victra shakes her head. “Mother was right about you. Always said you had secrets. I thought it was something sexual. That you liked horses or something.” Sevro shifts uncomfortably.

“So you find us a way off this rock, rich man?” Holiday asks Quicksilver.

“Not quite,” he says. “Darrow…”

“We’re not leaving,” I announce. Rollo and his men stir in the corner. The Howlers exchange confused looks.

“Maybe you wanna tell us what’s going on?” Screwface asks gruffly. “Let’s start with who’s in charge. Is it you?”

“Howler One,” Sevro says, punching my shoulder.

“Howler Two,” I say, patting his in turn.

“Prime?” Sevro asks. The Howlers nod in concert.

“First order of business, policy change,” I say. “Who has pliers?” I look around until Holiday pulls hers from her bomb kit and tosses them to me. I open my mouth and stick the pliers to the back right molar where the achlys-9 suicide tooth was implanted. With a grunt I tear it out and set the tooth on the table. “I’ve been captured before. I will not be captured again. So this is worthless to me. I don’t plan on dying, but if I do, I die with my friends. Not in a cell. Not on a podium. With you.” I hand the pliers to Sevro. He jerks out his own back tooth. Spitting the blood on the table.

“I die with my friends.”

Ragnar does not wait for the pliers. He pulls out his back tooth with his bare fingers, eyes wide with delight as he sets the huge bloody thing on the table. “I die with my friends.” One by one, they pass around the pliers, pulling out their teeth and tossing them down. Quicksilver watches all the while, staring at us like we’re a pack of mad hooligans, no doubt wondering about what he’s gotten himself into. But I need my men to lose this heavy mantle they wear. With that poison in their skulls, they felt the death sentences had already been read, and they were just waiting for the hangman to come knocking. Slag that. Death’ll have to earn its bounty. I want them to believe in this. In each other. In the idea that we might actually win and live.

For the first time, I do.

—

After I’ve detailed my instructions to my men and they depart to execute the orders, I return with Sevro to the Sons of Ares control room and ask for them to prepare a direct link. “To the Citadel in Agea, please.” The Sons of Ares turn to look at me to see if they’ve misheard. “On the double, friends. We don’t have all day.”

I stand in front of the holo camera with Sevro. “Think they already know we’re here?”

“Probably not quite yet,” I reply.

“Think he’s going to piss himself?”

“Let’s hope. Remember, nothing about Mustang and Cassius being here. We’re keeping that one in the pocket.”

The direct holoLink goes through and the face of a wan young Copper administrator looks sleepily back at us. “Citadel General Com,” she drones, “how may I direct your…” She blinks suddenly at our images on the display. Wipes sleep from her eyes. And loses all faculty of speech.

“I would like to speak with the ArchGovernor,” I say.

“And…may I say who is…calling?”

“It’s the bloodydamn Reaper of Mars,” Sevro barks.

“One moment, please.”

The Copper’s face is replaced by the pyramid of the Society. Terribly predictable Vivaldi plays as we wait. Sevro taps his fingers on his leg and murmurs his little tune under his breath. “If your heart beats like a drum, and your legs a little wet, it’s because the Reaper’s come to collect a little debt.”

Several minutes later, the Jackal’s pale face appears before us. He wears a jacket with a high white collar, and his hair is parted on the side. He does not leer at us. If anything, he looks amused as he continues to eat his breakfast. “The Reaper and Ares,” he says in a low drawl, mocking his own courtesy. He wipes his mouth on a napkin. “You departed so quickly last time I didn’t have time to say farewell. I must say, you’re looking positively radiant, Darrow. Is Victra with you?”

“Adrius,” I say flatly. “As you’re no doubt aware, there has been an explosion at Sun Industries, and your silent partner, Quicksilver, has gone missing. I know it’s a mess of jurisdiction, and the evidence won’t be sorted for hours, maybe days. So I wanted to call and clarify the situation. We, the Sons of Ares, have kidnapped Quicksilver.”

He sets his spoon down to sip from his white coffee cup.

“I see. To what end?”

“We will be holding him for ransom until you release all political prisoners illegally detained in your jails and all lowColors concentrated in internment camps. Additionally, you are to take responsibility for the murder of your father. Publicly.”

“Is that all?” the Jackal asks, not displaying a flicker of emotion, though I know he’s wondering how we discovered Quicksilver was his ally.

“You also have to personally kiss my pimply ass,” Sevro says.

“Lovely.” The Jackal looks off the screen to someone. “My agents tell me a flight moratorium was instituted ten minutes after the attack on Sun Industries and the vessel which fled the scene disappeared into the Hollows. Am I to assume then that you’re still on Phobos?”

I pause as if caught off guard. “If you do not comply, Quicksilver’s life is forfeit.”

“Lamentably, I do not negotiate with terrorists. Especially ones who may be recording my conversation to broadcast it for political gain.” The Jackal sips his coffee again. “I listened to your proposal, now listen to mine. Run. Now. While you can. But know, wherever you go, wherever you hide, you cannot protect your friends. I’m going to kill them all and put you back in the darkness with their severed heads for company. There is no way out, Darrow. This I promise you.”

He kills the signal.

“Think he’ll send the Boneriders before the legions?” Sevro asks.

“Let’s hope. Time to get moving.”

—

The Hollows is a city of cages. Row upon row. Column upon column of rusty metal homes linked together in the null gravity as far as the eye can see here in the heart of Phobos. Each cage a life in miniature. Clothing floats on hooks. Little portable thermal press-grills sizzle with the foods of a hundred different regions of Mars. Paper pictures cling to iron cage walls by bits of tape, showing distant lakes, mountains, and families gathered together. Everything here is dull and gray. The metal of the cages. The limp clothing. Even the tired and wasted faces of the Oranges and Reds who are trapped here, thousands of kilometers from home. Sparks of color dance up from the datapads and holoVisor that glow through the city, bits of dream scattered on twisted scrap metal. Men and women sit penitent over their little displays, watching their little programs, forgetting where they are in favor of where they’d wish to be. Many have taped paper or blankets over the sides of their walls to give them some semblance of privacy from their neighbors. But it’s the scent and the sound you cannot escape. The throaty unceasing rattle of cage doors slamming shut. Locks clicking. Men laughing and coughing. Generators humming. Public holoCans yapping and barking the dog language of distraction. All stirred and boiled together to make a thick soup of noise and shadowy light.

Rollo once lived in negative south end of the city. Now it is deep Syndicate territory. The Sons were chased out more than two months ago. I fly along the lines of plastic rope that weave through the cage canyons, passing dockworkers and tower laborers who climb back to their little cage homes. They jerk their heads toward the throaty thrum of my new gravBoots. It’s an alien sound to them. One heard only over the holoVids or experiential virtual realities low world Greens hawk for fifty credits a minute. Most will never have seen a Peerless Scarred in the flesh. Much less one in full armor. I’m a terrifying spectacle.

It was seven hours ago that my lieutenants and I clustered together in the Sons of Ares ready room and I told them and Dancer back in Tinos my plan. Six hours since I learned of Kavax’s escape from our detention cell—someone let him out. Five hours since Victra delivered Quicksilver and Matteo back to their tower, where Quicksilver has spent the remainder of the night activating his own cells and contacts in the Blue Hives, making preparation for this moment. Four hours since Quicksilver joined his security teams with Sons of Ares and gave them access to his armories and his weapons depots, and we received word that two Augustus destroyers were inbound from the orbital docks. Three hours since Ragnar and Rollo took a thousand Sons of Ares to the garbage hangars on level 43C to prepare their skiffs. Two hours since one of Quicksilver’s private yachts was prepped for launch. One hour since the Society destroyers deployed four troop transports to dock at the Skyresh Interplanetary Spaceport and the new coat of blood-red paint on my armor dried and I donned it to march to war.

All is ready.

Now I carve a wake of silence into the heart of the Hollows. My bone-white razor is on my arm. At my side flies Sevro, wearing the huge spiked helmet of Ares with pride. He brought it along, but the rest of his armor is borrowed from Quicksilver. It’s cutting-edge tech. Better even than the suits we wore for Augustus. Holiday follows behind along with a hundred Sons of Ares.

The Sons are awkward on their gravBoots. Some carry razors. Others pulseFists. But, per my orders, not one wears a helmet as we fly. I wanted these lowColors of the stacks witnessing our treason, so that they feel emboldened by Reds and Oranges and Obsidians wearing the armor of the masters.

The faces are a blur. A hundred thousand peering from the homes in every direction. Pale and confused, most under the age of forty. Reds and Oranges brought here with false promises just like Rollo, with families down on Mars, just like Rollo.

Neighbors point in my direction. I see my name on their lips. Somewhere, the Syndicate watchmen will be dialing their superiors, relaying the news to the police or the Securitas antiterrorism apparatus that the Reaper lives and he is on Phobos.

I bait the beasts.

As I coast into the central hub of the city, I say a silent prayer, willing Eo to give me strength. There, like some pulsing electronic idol fenced in by metal bramble, a holographic display casts Society comedy programing one hundred meters long, fifty meters broad. It bathes the circle of cages around it in sickly neon light. Speakers laugh on cue. Blue light plays over my armor. Locks jingle as they’re undone and cages are pushed open so their inhabitants can sit on the edge and dangle their legs off to watch me without looking through the cage bars.

Quicksilver’s Greens focus their helmet cameras on me. The Sons array around, eyes smoldering out at the lowColors, my honor guard. Their red hair floating like a hundred angry torch flames. Holiday and Ares flank me to either side. Floating two hundred meters in the air. Surrounded by cages. Silence gripping the city except the laugh track of the comedy. It’s sick and weird as it cackles out of the speakers. I nod to Quicksilver’s Greens, and they cut the noise and somewhere in his tower, the hacker teams he’s assembled hijack every broadcast on the moon and issue commands to secondary datahubs on Earth, Luna, the asteroid belt, Mercury, the moons of Jupiter, so my message will burn across the blackness of space, taking over the data web that links mankind. Quicksilver is proving his allegiance with this broadcast, using the network he helped the Jackal build. This is not like Eo’s death. A viral video you have to dig for in the dark spaces of the holoNet. This is a grand roar across the Society, broadcasting on ten billion holos to eighteen billion people.

They gave these screens to us as chains. Today, we make them hammers.

Karnus au Bellona had his faults. But he was right when he said that all we have in this life is our shout into the wind. He shouted his own name, and I learned the folly in that. But before I begin the war that will claim me one way or another, I will make my shout. And it will be something far greater than my own name. Far greater than a roar of family pride. It is the dream I’ve carried and shepherded since I was sixteen.

Eo appears beneath me on the hologram, replacing the comedy.

A ghostly giant of the girl I knew. Her face is quiet and pale and angrier than in my dreams. Hair dull and stringy. Clothing drab and ragged. But her eyes burn out from her gray surroundings, bright as the blood on her mangled back as she looks up from the metal whipping box. Her mouth barely seems to open. Just a sliver of space between her lips, but her song bleeds from her, voice thin and fragile as a spring dream.

My son, my son

Remember the chains

When gold ruled with iron reins

We roared and roared

And twisted and screamed

For ours, a vale

Of better dreams

She echoes across the metal city louder than she echoed in that far-off lost city of stone. Her light flickering across the pale faces watching from their cages. These Oranges and Reds who never knew her in life, but hear her in death. They’re silent and sad as she is walked to the gallows. I hear my vain cries. See myself sagging against Gray hands. Feel I’m there again. The hard-packed dirt on my knees as the world falls out from under me. Augustus speaks with Pliny and Leto as frayed hemp loops around Eo’s neck. Hatred radiates from the faces in the Stacks. I could no more stop Eo’s death then than I can stop it now. It’s as if it always has been. My wife falls. I flinch, hearing the rustling of her clothing. The creaking of the rope. And I look down at the hologram, forcing myself to watch as the boy I was stumbles forward to wrap his hands with their Red Sigils around her kicking legs. I watch him kiss her ankle and pull her feet with all his feeble strength. Her haemanthus falls, and I speak.

“I would have lived in peace. But my enemies brought me war. My name is Darrow of Lykos. You know my story. It is but an echo of your own. They came to my home and killed my wife, not for singing a song but for daring to question their reign. For daring to have a voice. For centuries millions beneath the soil of Mars have been fed lies from cradle to grave. That lie has been revealed to them. Now they’ve entered the world you know, and they suffer as you do.

“Man was born free, but from the ocean shores to the crater cities of Mercury to the ice waste of Pluto down to the mines of Mars, he is in chains. Chains made of duty, hunger, fear. Chains hammered to our necks by a race that we lifted up. A race that we empowered. Not to rule, not to reign, but to lead us from a world torn by war and greed. Instead, they have led us into darkness. They have used the systems of order and prosperity for their own gain. They expect your obedience, ignore your sacrifice, and hoard the prosperity that your hands create. To hold tight to their reign, they forbid our dreams. Saying a person is only as good as the Colors of their eyes, of their Sigils.”

I remove my gloves and clench my right fist in the air as Eo did before she died. But unlike Eo, my hands bear no Sigils. Removed by Mickey when I was Carved in Tinos. I am the first soul in hundreds of years to walk without them. The silence in the Hollows gives way to sounds of shock, fear.

“But now I stand before you, a man unbound. I stand before you, my brothers and sisters, to ask you to join me. To throw yourselves on the machines of industry. To unite behind the Sons of Ares. Take back your cities, your prosperity. Dare to dream of better worlds than these. Slavery is not peace. Freedom is peace. And until we have that, it is our duty to make war. This is no license for savagery or genocide. If a man rapes, you kill him on the spot. If a man murders civilians, high or low, you kill him on the spot. This is war, but you are on the side of good and that carries a heavy burden. We rise not for hate, not for vengeance, but for justice. For your children. For their future.

“I speak now to Gold, to the Aureate who rule. I have walked your halls, broken your schools, eaten at your tables, and suffered your gallows. You tried to kill me. You could not. I know your power. I know your pride. And I have seen how you will fall. For seven hundred years, you have ruled over the dominion of man, and this is all you have given us. It is not enough.

“Today, I declare your rule to be at its end. Your cities are not your cities. Your vessels are not your vessels. Your planets are not your planets. They were built by us. And they belong to us, the common trust of man. Now we take them back. Never mind the darkness you spread, never mind the night you summon, we will rage against it. We will howl and fight till our last breath, not just in the mines of Mars, but on the shores of Venus, on the dunes of Io’s sulfur seas, in the glacial valleys of Pluto. We will fight in the towers of Ganymede and the ghettos of Luna and the storm-stricken oceans of Europa. And if we fall, others will take our place, because we are the tide. And we are rising.”

Then Sevro slams his fist against his chest. Once, twice, thumping it rhythmically. It is echoed by the two hundred Sons of Ares. Their fists pounding their chests. By the Howlers.

In the steel mesh of the cages men and women thump their fists into the walls till it sounds like the heartbeat rising through the bowels of this vampire moon; up through the Hives of Blues, where they sit drinking coffee and studying gravitational mathematics under the warm lights of their intellectual communes; through the Gray barracks in each precinct; among the Silvers at their trading desks; the Golds in their mansions and yachts.

Out through the black ink that separates our little bubbles of life before careening down into the halls of the Jackal’s lonely hold on Attica, where he sits in his winter throne, surrounded by a sea of bent necks. There our sound rattles in his ears. There he hears my wife’s heart beat on. And he cannot stop it as it goes down and down into the mines of Mars, playing on the screens as Reds beat on their tables and the Copper magistrates watch in swelling fear as the miners look hatefully up through the duroglass that keeps them imprisoned.

Her heart beats mutinously through the bustling oceanside promenades of the archipelagos of Venus as sailboats float proudly in the harbor and shopping bags hang in frightened hands and Golds look to their drivers, their gardeners, the men who power their cities. It beats through the tin-roofed mess halls of the wheat and soybean latfundia that cover the Great Plains of Earth, where Reds use machines to toil under the huge sun to feed mouths of people they will never meet, in places they will never be. It beats even along the spine of the empire, raging through the spiked city moon of Luna, passing by the Sovereign in her glass high refuge to thunder on down snaking electrical wires and drying clothing lines to the Lost City, where a Pink girl makes breakfast after a long night of thankless work. Where a Brown cook leans away from his stove to hear as grease spatters his apron, and a Gray watches from the window of his patrol skiff as a Violet girl smashes the front door of a Post Office and his datapad summons him back to the station for emergency riot protocols.

And it beats inside me, this terrible hope, as I know that the end has begun, and I am finally awake.

“Break the chains,” I roar.

And my people roar back.

“Ragnar,” I say into my com. “Bring it down.”

The Greens cut to a different feed as the fists thump and the cages rattle. And we see a distant shot of the Society’s military spire on Phobos. A goliath of a building with docks and vestibules for weapons. Efficient and ugly as a crab. From it, the Jackal maintains his grip on the moon. There, the Grays and Obsidians will be donning armor under pale lights, rushing through metal halls in tight lines, stocking ammunition belts, and kissing pictures of their loved ones so they can come down to the Hollows and make this heart stop beating. But they will never make it here.

Because, as fists pound even harder into cages, the lights of that military spire go black. All her power turned off by Rollo and his men with the access cards provided by Quicksilver.

We could have bombed the building, but I wanted a triumph of daring, of achievement, not destruction. We need heroes. Not another ash city.

And so, a small squadron of a dozen maintenance skiffs coasts into view. Flat, ugly fliers designed to port Reds and Oranges like Rollo to their construction work on towers. Craggy stingrays covered with barnacles. But it isn’t barnacles that cling to them now. Another camera takes a closer angle, and we can see each skiff is covered with hundreds of men. Reds and Oranges in their clunky EVA suits, almost half the Sons of Ares on Phobos. Boots against the deck, harnesses latched into exterior buckles of the ship. They carry their welding gear and have Quicksilver’s weapons patched onto their legs with magnetic tape.

Among them, two feet taller than the others, is their general, Ragnar Volarus, in armor freshly painted bone white, a red slingBlade painted on the chest and back.

As the skiffs near the Society military spire, they divide down the length of the building. Sons fire magnetic harpoons to tether the skiffs to the steel. And then they go with practiced ease along the lines, flying at implausible speeds as the little motors on their buckles pull them one by one along toward the building. It’s like watching Reds in the mines. The grace and nimbleness even in the clunky suits dazzle.

More than a thousand welders pour onto the vast building like we did Quicksilver’s spire, but they’re not playing for stealth and they’re better in null gravity than we were. Magnetic boots clutching metal girders, they skitter across the building, melting through the viewports and entering with extreme prejudice. Dozens are ripped to shreds as Grays inside fire railguns out the glass, but they fire back and pour inward. A ripWing patrol banks in along the outside of the building and rakes two of the skiffs with chain guns. Men turn to mist.

A Son fires a rocket at the ripWing. Fire blooms and vanishes and the ship cracks in half in a gout of purple flame.

The camera follows Ragnar as he breaches a window, enters a hall, and runs full-tilt into a trio of Gold knights, one who I recognize as the cousin of Priam, the man Sevro killed in the Passage and whose mother owns the deed to Phobos. Ragnar flows through the young knight without stopping. Swinging both his razors like scissors and ululating the war cry of his people, followed by a pack of heavily armed welders and laborers. I told him I wanted the spire. I didn’t tell him how to take it. He walked off with Rollo, putting an arm around the man.

Now the worlds watch a slave become a hero.

“This moon belongs to you,” Sevro says, roaring to the roiling cage city. “Rise and take it! Rise, men of Mars. Women of Mars, rise! You bloodydamn bastards! Rise!” Men and women are pulling themselves from their homes. Donning their boots and jackets. Pushing themselves toward us so that thousands clog the air avenues, crawling over the outside of the cages.

The tide has risen. And I feel a deep terror in wondering exactly what it will wash away. “Rape and murder of innocents is punishable by death. This is war, but you are on the side of good. Remember that, you little shitheads! Protect your brothers! Protect your sisters! All residents of sections 1a-4c, you are to take the armory in level 14. Residents of sections 5c-3f are to take the water-purification center on…”

Sevro seizes control of the battle and the Howlers and Sons disperse to organize the mob. It isn’t an army but a battering ram. Many will die. And when they die, more will rise in their place. This is just one of the stack cities of Phobos. The Sons will supply them with weapons, but there won’t be nearly enough to go around. Their sword is the press of flesh. Sevro will lead them, spend them, Victra in Quicksilver’s spires will guide them, and the moon will fall to the rebellion.

But I will not be here to see it.