Morning Star

Phobos is in uproar. Detonations shake the moon as Holiday and I run through the halls. Golds and Silvers evacuate the Needles in their flashing luxury yachts as kilometers beneath, the Hollows swarms with packs of lowColor mobs armed with welding torches, fusion cutters, pipes, black-market scorchers, and old-fashioned slug throwers. The mobs are overwhelming the tram systems and passages to gain access to the mid-sector and Needles while the Society military garrison, caught reeling from the attack on their headquarters, rushes to stop the upward migration. The Legions have training and organization on their side. We have numbers and surprise.

Not to mention fury.

No matter how many checkpoints the Grays blockade, how many trams the Grays destroy, the lowColors will seep through the cracks because they made this place, because they have allies among the midColors, thanks to Quicksilver. They open derelict transportation tunnels, hijack cargo ships in the industrial sector, pack them full of men and women, and steer them for the luxury hangars in the Needles, or even toward the public Skyresh Interplanetary Spaceport, where cruise liners and passenger ships are being loaded with evacuees.

I’m remotely jacked into Quicksilver’s security grid, watching highColors stampede over one another. Carrying luggage and valuables and children. Martian Navy ripWings and fast-moving fighters dart through the towers, shooting down the rebel ships rising from the Hollows toward the Needles. The debris from a destroyed lowColor skif crashes through the vaulted glass and steel ceiling of a Skyresh terminal, killing civilians, and shattering any illusion I might have had that this war would be sanitary.

Ducking away from a mob of lowColors, Holiday and I arrive outside a derelict hangar in the old freight garages, which haven’t been used since before the time of Augustus. It’s quiet here. Abandoned. The old pedestrian entrance is welded shut. Radiation signs warn potential scavengers away. But the doors open for us with a deep groan when a modern retinal scanner built into the metal registers my irises, as Quicksilver said it would.

The hangar is a vast rectangle skinned with dust and cobwebs. In the center of the hangar’s deck sits a silver seventy-meter-long luxury yacht shaped like a sparrow in flight. It’s a custom-built model out of the Venusian Shipyards, ostentatious, fast, and perfect for an obscenely wealthy war refugee. Quicksilver plucked it from his fleet to help us blend in with the migrating upper class. Its rear cargo plank is down, and inside the bird is filled to capacity with black crates stamped with the Sun Industries winged heel. Inside of which are several billion credits’ worth of hi-tech weapons and equipment.

Holiday whistles. “Gotta love deep pockets. The fuel would cost my annual wages. Twice over.”

We cross the hangar to meet Quicksilver’s pilot. The trim young Blue waits at the bottom of the ramp. She has no eyebrows and her head is bald. Winding blue lines pulse beneath the skin where subdermal synaptic links connect her remotely to the ship. She snaps to attention, eyes wide. Clearly she had no idea who she was transporting until now. “Sir, I am Lieutenant Vesta. I’ll be your pilot today. And I must say, it’s an honor to have you on board.”

There’s three levels to the yacht, the upper and bottom for Gold use. The middle for cooks, servants, and crew. There’s four staterooms, a sauna, and crème leather seats with dainty little chocolates and napkins sitting primly on armrests in the passenger cabin to the far back of the cockpit. I pocket one. And then a couple more.

As Holiday and Vesta prep the ship, I strip off my pulseArmor in the passenger cabin and unpack winter gear from one of the boxes. I dress in skintight nanofiber weave that’s much like scarabSkin. But instead of black, it’s mottled white and looks oily except for textured grips on the elbows, gloves, buttocks, and knees. It’s crafted for polar temperatures and water immersion. It’s also a hundred pounds lighter than our pulseArmor, is immune to digital component failures, and has the added benefit of not needing batteries. Much as I enjoy using four hundred million credits’ worth of technology to make me a flying human tank, sometimes warm pants are more valuable. And we’ll always have the pulseArmor if we need it in a pinch.

I’m struck by the silence in the cargo bay and the hangar as I finish lacing my boots. There’s still fifteen minutes left on my datapad’s timer, so I sit on the edge of the ramp, legs dangling off, to wait for Ragnar. I pull the chocolates from my pocket and slowly peel the foil off. Taking half a bite, I let the chocolate sit on my tongue, waiting for it to melt as I always do. And as always, I lose patience and chew it before the bottom half is melted through. Eo would make candy last for days, when we were lucky enough to have it.

I set my datapad on the ground and watch the helmet cameras of my friends as they wage my war for Phobos. Their chatter trembles out of the datapad’s speakers, echoing in the vast metal chamber. Sevro’s in his element, rushing through the central ventilation unit with hundreds of Sons loading themselves into the air ducts. I feel guilty for sitting here watching them, but we each have our parts to play.

The door we entered through opens with a groan and Ragnar and two of the Obsidian Howlers enter the room. Fresh from the battlefield, Ragnar’s white armor is dented and stained. “Did you play gently with the fools, my goodman?” I call down from the ramp in my thickest highLingo. In reply, he tosses up to me a curule: a twisted gold scepter of power given to high-ranking military officers. This one is a tipped with a screaming banshee and a splash of crimson.

“The tower has fallen,” Ragnar says. “Rollo and the Sons finish my work. These are the stains of subGovernor Priscilla au Caan.”

“Well done, my friend,” I say, taking the scepter in my hands. On it is carved the deeds of the Caan family, which owned the two moons of Mars and once followed Bellona to war. Among great warriors and statesmen, there’s a young man I recognize standing by a horse.

“What is wrong?” Ragnar asks.

“Nothing,” I say. “I knew her son is all. Priam. He seemed decent enough.”

“Decent is not enough,” Ragnar says forlornly “Not for their world.”

With a grunt, I bend the curule against my knee and toss it back to him to show my agreement. “Give it to your sister. Time to go.”

Glancing back at the hangar with a frown, he checks his datapad and files past me into the cargo hold. I try to wipe the blood from the curule off on my white suit’s leg. It just smears over the oily fabric, giving me a red stripe on my thigh. I close the ramp behind me. Inside, I help Ragnar out of his pulseArmor and let him slip into the winter gear as I join Holiday and Vesta as they initiate preflight launch.

“Remember, we’re refugees. Aim for the largest convoy heading out of here and stick to them.” Vesta nods. It’s an old hangar. So it has no pulseField. All that separates us from space are five-story-tall steel doors. They rumble as the motors begin to retract them into the ceiling and floor. “Stop!” I say. Vesta sees what caught my attention a second after I do and her hand flashes to the controls, stopping the doors before they part and open the hangar to vacuum.

“I’ll be damned,” Holiday says, peering out the cockpit to a small figure blocking our ship’s path to space. “It’s the lion.”

—

Mustang stands in front of the ship illuminated by our headlights. Her hair washed white by the blinding light. She blinks as Holiday cuts the headlights from the cockpit and I make my way to her through the dim hangar. Her dancing eyes dissect me as I come. They dart from to my Sigil-barren hands to the scar I’ve kept on my face. What does she see?

Does she see my resolve? My fear?

In her I see so much. The girl I fell in love with in the snow is gone, replaced in the last fifteen months by a woman. A thin, intense leader of vast and enduring strength and alarming intellect. Eyes kinetic, ringed by circles of exhaustion and trapped in a face made pale from long days in sunless lands and metal halls. Everything she is dwells behind her eyes. She has her father’s mind. Her mother’s face. And a distant, foreboding sort of intelligence that can give you wings or crush you to the earth.

And just at her hip sits a ghostCloak with a cooling unit.

She has watched us since we arrived.

How did she get inside the hangar?

“ ’Lo, Reaper,” she says playfully as I come to a halt.

“ ’Lo, Mustang.” I search the rest of the hangar. “How did you find me?”

She frowns in confusion. “I thought you wanted me to come. Ragnar told Kavax where I could find you…” She trails off. “Oh. You didn’t know.”

“No.” I look back up at the ship’s mirror cockpit windows, where Ragnar must be watching me. The man’s overstepped his bounds. Even as I arranged a war, he went behind my back and endangered my mission. Now I know exactly how Sevro felt.

“Where have you been?” she asks me.

“With your brother.”

“Then the execution was a ruse meant to make us stop looking.”

There’s so much more to say, so many questions and accusations that could fly between us. But I didn’t want to see her because I don’t know where to begin. What to say. What to ask for. “I don’t have time for small talk, Mustang. I know you came to Phobos to surrender to the Sovereign. Now why are you here talking to me?”

“Don’t talk down to me,” she says sharply. “I wasn’t surrendering. I was making peace. You’re not the only one with people to protect. My father ruled Mars for decades. Its people are as much a part of me as they are part of you.”

“You left Mars at the mercy of your brother,” I say.

“I left Mars to save it,” she corrects. “You know everything is a compromise. And you know it’s not Mars you’re angry at me for leaving.”

“I need you to stand aside, Mustang. This is not about us. And I don’t have time to bicker. I’m leaving. So either you move or we open the door and fly through you.”

“Fly through me?” she laughs. “You know I didn’t have to come alone. I could have come with my bodyguards. I could have lain in wait to ambush you. Or reported you to the Sovereign to salvage the peace you ruined. But I didn’t. Can you stop for a single moment to think why?” She takes a step forward. “You said to me in that tunnel that you want a better world. Can’t you see that I listened? That I joined the Moon Lords because I believe in something better?”

“Yet you surrendered.”

“Because I could not watch my brother’s reign of terror continue. I want peace.”

“This is not the time for peace,” I say.

“Goryhell, you’re thick. I know that. Why do you think I am here? Why do you think I’ve worked with Orion and kept your soldiers at their stations?”

I examine her. “I honestly don’t know.”

“I’m here because I want to believe in you, Darrow. I want to believe in what you said in that tunnel. I ran from you because I didn’t want to accept that the only answer was the sword. But the world we live in has conspired to take everything I love away. My mother, my father, my brothers. I will not let it take the friends I have left. I will not let it take you.”

“What are you saying?” I ask.

“I’m saying that I’m not letting you out of my sight. I’m coming with you.”

It’s my turn to laugh. “You don’t even know where I’m going.”

“You’re wearing sealSkin. Ragnar’s on board. You’ve declared open rebellion. Now you’re leaving in the middle of the largest battle the Rising has ever seen. Really, Darrow. It doesn’t take a genius to deduce that now you’re using this ship to pretend to be a Gold refugee to escape and go to the Valkyrie Spires to beseech Ragnar’s mother to provide an army.”

Damn. I try not to let my surprise show.

This is why I did not want to involve Mustang. Inviting her into the game is adding another dimension I can’t control. She could destroy my gambit with a single call to her brother, to the Sovereign, telling them where I am going. Everything relies on misdirection. On my enemies thinking I am on Phobos. She knows what I’m thinking. I can’t let her leave this hangar.

“The Telemanuses know as well,” she says, knowing my mind. “But I’m tired of having insurance plans against you. Tired of playing games. You and I have pushed each other away because of broken trust. Aren’t you tired of that? Of the secrets between us? Of the guilt?”

“You know I am. I laid my secrets bare in the tunnels of Lykos.”

“Then let this be our second chance. For you. For me. For both our people. I want what you want. And when you and I are aligned, when have we ever lost? Together we can build something, Darrow.”

“You’re suggesting an alliance…” I say quietly.

“Yes.” Her eyes are afire. “The might of House Augustus and Telemanus and Arcos united with the Rising. With the Reaper. With Orion and all her ships. The Society would tremble.”

“Millions will die in that war,” I say. “You know that. The Peerless Scarred will fight to the last Gold. Can you stomach that? Can you watch that happen?”

“To build we must break,” she says. “I was listening.”

Still, I shake my head. There’s too much to overcome between us, between our people. It would be a qualified victory, on her terms. “How could I ask my men to trust a Gold army? How could I trust you?”

“You can’t. That is why I am coming with you. To prove I believe in your wife’s dream. But you have to prove something to me. That you are worthy of my trust, in turn. I know you can break. I need to see that you can build. I need to see what you will build. If the blood we will shed is for something. Prove that, and you have my sword. Fail, and you and I will go our separate ways.” She cocks her head at me. “So what do you say, Helldiver? Do you want to give it one more go?”