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.”