Morning Star

Our sleek yacht passes a motley fleet of slow-moving garbage haulers and freighters. Inside, men and women huddle quietly together in windowless, dirty steel cubes. Sweat drenches their backs. Their hands shake holding unfamiliar instruments: weapons. They pray they can be as brave as they’ve always imagined themselves to be. Then they’ll land in some Gold hangar. The Sons will shout orders. The doors will open and they will meet war.

I pray silently for them, clenching my hands as I stare out the window. I feel Mustang watching me. Measuring the tides deep within.

Soon we leave the industrial Stacks behind, trading the dim recesses for the neon advertisements that bathe the space boulevards of the midSector. Manmade canyons of steel to either side. Trams. Elevators. Apartments. Every screen connected to the web has been slaved by Quicksilver’s hackers, showing images of Sevro and the Sons overrunning security gates and checkpoints, painting scythes on walls.

And around us, the city of thirty million churns. Deep space commercial transports racing past little civilian taxis and skippers meant to go between the buildings here. Freighters soar from the Hollows up through the midSector toward the Needles. A flight of ripWings hunts through the streets above us. I hold my breath. With a flip of a trigger they could shred us. But they don’t. They register our highColor ship ID and hail us over the coms and offer an escort out of the warzone toward a current of yachts and skiffs that blaze quietly away from the moon.

“Stirring speech,” Victra purrs over the ship’s com as I answer the call from Quicksilver’s tower, her bored voice at odds with the warring world around us. “Clown and Screwface just took Skyresh’s main terminals. Rollo’s men have seized the water cisterns for the midSector. Quicksilver’s networks are broadcasting it all the way to Luna. Scythes popping up everywhere. There’s riots in Agea, Corinth, everywhere on Mars. And we’re hearing the same from Earth and Luna. Municipal buildings are falling. Police stations burning. You’ve woken the rabble.”

“They’ll hit back soon.”

“As you said, darling. We massacred the first responders the Jackal sent. Got a few Boneriders, just as we wanted. No Lilath or Thistle, though.”

“Damn. Worth a shot.”

“Martian Navy is on its way from Deimos. The Legions are coming, and we’re making our final preparations.”

“Good. Good. Victra, I need you to let Sevro know that we’ve added a member to our expedition. Mustang’s joined us.”

Silence from her. “Am I on a private line?”

Holiday tosses me a headset from the cockpit. I wrestle the headset on. “You are now. You don’t agree.”

The bitterness in her tone is acute. “Here are my thoughts. You can’t trust her. Look at her brother. Her father. Greed is in her blood. Of course she would ally with us. It fits her aims.” I watch Mustang as Victra speaks. “She needs us because she’s losing her war. But what happens when we give her what she needs? What happens when we’re in her way? Will you be able to put her down? Will you be able to pull the trigger?”

“Yes.”

—

Victra’s words linger as we pass Phobos’s giant glass spires, cockpit skimming a dozen meters above the panes of the building. Inside roil little worlds of madness. The Rising has reached the Needles in this district of the city. LowColors push inexorably through the halls. Grays and Silvers barricading doors. Pinks standing in a bedroom over a bleeding old Gold and his wife, knives in hand. Three Silver children watching Ares on a wall-sized holo as their parents speak in the library. And at last, a Gold woman in a sky-blue cocktail dress, pearls about her neck, gold hair unbound to her waist. She stands near a window as Sons of Ares spread through the building, levels beneath her penthouse. Engulfed in her own drama, she raises a scorcher to her Golden head. Body stiff in imagined majesty. Her finger tightens around the trigger.

And we’re past. Leaving her life and the chaos behind to join with the flow of yachts and pleasure craft that flee the battle for the safety of the planet. Most of the refugees call Mars home. Their ships, unlike ours, are not equipped for deep space. Now they scatter over the planet’s atmosphere like burning seeds, most plunging straight for the spaceport of Corinth beneath us in the middle of the Thermic Sea. Others skimming over the atmosphere, disregarding designated transit lanes, racing past the Jackal’s hastily erected blockade and the satellite level toward their homes in the opposite hemisphere. RipWings and wasps from the military frigates flash after them, trying to herd them back to the designated avenues. But entitlement and chaos are a poor mix. Mania grips these fleeing Golds.

“The Dido,” Mustang says quietly to herself, eying a glass ship the shape of a sailboat to our starboard. “Drusilla au Ran’s vessel. She taught me how to paint watercolors when I was little.” But my attention is farther out, where ugly dark vessels without the flashing hulls or fanciful lines of the pleasure craft race toward Phobos. It’s more than half the Martian defense fleet. Frigates, torchShips, destroyers. Even two dreadnaughts. I wonder if the Jackal is on one of those bridges. Likely not. It’s probably Lilath who leads the detachment, or some other praetor newly appointed in his regime. Antonia has been dispatched to aid Roque on the Rim. Their ships will be packed with lifelong soldiers. Men and women as hard as we are. Many who fell in my Iron Rain. And they will cut through the mob I’ve summoned inside Phobos like paper. They’ll be furious and confident: the more, the better.

“It’s a trap, isn’t it?” Mustang asks quietly. “You never meant to hold Phobos.”

“Do you know how the Inuit tribes of Earth killed wolves?” I ask. She doesn’t. “Slower and weaker than the wolves, they chiseled knives till they were razor sharp, coated them in blood and stuck them upright in the ice. Then the wolves would come up and lick the blood. And as the wolf licks faster and faster, he’s so ravenous he doesn’t realize until it’s too late that the blood he’s drinking is his own.” I nod to the passing military vessels. “They hate that I was one of them. How many prime soldiers do you think those ships will launch at Phobos to take me, the great abomination for their own glory? Pride will again be the downfall of your Color.”

“You’re trying to get them on the station,” she says, understanding. “Because you don’t need Phobos.”