We surge onto the bridge, expecting an ambush. Instead, it’s calm. Clean, lights dimmed, just as Roque prefers it. Beethoven streams out from hidden speakers. Everyone is still at their stations. Wan faces illuminated by pale light. Two Golds walk along the wide metal path that leads over the pits toward the front of the bridge where Roque stands orchestrating his battle before a thirty-meter-wide holographic projection. Ships dance among the sensors. Framed by fire, he cycles through images, issuing commands like a great conductor summoning the passion of an orchestra. His mind a beautiful, terrible weapon. He’s destroying our fleet. Mustang’s Dejah Thoris leaks flame from her oxygen stores as the Colossus and her three escort destroyers continue to hammer her with railguns. Men and debris float through space.This is just one part of the larger battle. The great host of his force, including Antonia, has pursued Romulus, Orion and the Telemanuses toward Jupiter.
To our left, twenty meters away, near the bridge’s armory, a tactical squad of Obsidian and Grays secure their heavy weapons and listen intently to their Gold commanders, preparing to defend their bridge against me.
And just to our right, at the control panel by the now open door, unseen and unnoticed by anyone else on the bridge, trembles a small Pink in a white valet’s uniform. The passcode display glows green under her hands. Her thin figure is frail against the backdrop of war. But the woman’s face is set defiantly, her finger on the door’s release button, her mouth spreading into the most delightful little smile as she shuts the door behind us.
All this in three seconds. The Gold infantry commander sees us.
Wolves, lovely as they are when they howl, kill best in silence. So I point to the left and the Obsidian surge toward the soldiers listening to the Gold. He shouts for them to turn, but Sefi is already on his men before they can lift their weapons. Dancing through them with her blades fluttering into faces and knees. Her Valkyrie smash into the rest. Only two guns go off by the time the Gold’s body slides off the end of Sefi’s razor and thumps to the floor.
Grays fire at us from the other side of the pit. Holiday and her commandos pick them off. My helmet slithers away. “Roque,” I snarl as my men continue to kill.
He’s turned now from his battle to see me. All the nobility in him, all the cold-blooded Imperator melting away, leaving him a stunned, startled man. Victra and I stalk across the bridge, Blues beneath us to every side, staring up at us in confusion and fear even as their ship is engaged in battle. Silently, Roque’s two Praetorians come at us. Both wear black and purple armor adorned with the silver quarter moon of House Lune. We pair off on the metal bridge in the hydra. Victra taking the right, me the left. My Praetorian is shorter than I. Her helmet off, hair in a tight bun, ready to proclaim the grand laurels of her family. “My name is Felicia au…” I feint a whip at her face. She brings her blade up, and Victra goes diagonal and impales her at the belly button. I finish her off with a neat decapitation.
“Bye, Felicia.” Victra spits, turning to the last Praetorian. “No substance these days. Are you of the same fiber?” The man drops his razor and goes to his knees, saying something about surrender. Victra’s about to cut his head off anyway, when she glimpses me out of the corner of her eye. Grudgingly, she accepts his surrender, kicking him in the face and hands him over to our Obsidians who secure the bridge. “You like the clawDrills?” Victra asks, pacing to Roque’s left. Hungry for the kill. “That’s some poetic justice for you, you little backstabbing bitch.”
The Blues still watch on, unsure of what to do. The boarding party that came for us now fills our place in the corridor outside the bridge. We left the drill, but it would take them ten minutes at least to breach the door.
The com on Roque’s head buzzes with requests for orders. Squadrons he’d sent on attack runs now drift, over-exposed. Their commanders used to being guided by the invisible hand now fight blind to the overall battle. It’s the flaw in Roque’s strategy. The individual initiative now creates chaos, because the central intelligence has just gone silent.
“Roque, tell your fleet to stand down,” I demand. I’m soaked with sweat. Hamstring pulled. Hand trembling with exhaustion. I take a heavy step forward. Boot clomping on the steel. “Do it.”
He stares past me, at the Pink who let us onto the bridge. Voice thick with the betrayal of a lover instead of that of a master. “Amathea…even you?” The young woman is not shamed by his sadness. She pulls her shoulders back, anchoring herself to the spot. She removes the rose badge on her collar that marks her the property of the gens Fabii and drops it to the ground.
A tremor passes through my friend. “You romantic sop.” Victra laughs. I close the distance between myself and Roque. Boots tracking blood over his gray steel deck. I point to the display behind him where Mustang’s ship is dying. I can see the stars glittering through holes in her hull, but still the destroyers punish her. They’re orientated off the bow of the Pax, thirty kilometers closer than her ship.
“Tell them to stop firing!” I say, pointing my razor at him. His own is on his hip. He knows how little it means to draw it against me. “Do it now.”
“No.”
“That’s Mustang!” I say.
“She chose her fate.”
“How many men did you send?” I ask coldly. “How many did you send to the Pax to bring me back here? Fifteen thousand? How many are on those destroyers?” I slide back the protective sheath over my datapad on my left forearm and summon the reactor diagnostics of the Pax. It pulses red. We’ve reversed the coolant flow to let the reactor overheat. A slight increase in the output demand and it goes thermal. “Tell them to cease fire or their lives are forfeit.”
He lifts his gentle chin. “According to my conscience I can give no such order.”
He knows what it means
“Then this is on both of us.”
His head snaps toward his comBlue. “Cyrus, tell the destroyers to take evasive action.”
“Too late,” Victra says as I raise the output on the generator. It throbs an evil crimson on my datapad, washing us with its light. And on the hologram behind Roque, the Pax begins to release gouts of blue flame. Frantically responding to their Imperator, the destroyers halt their barrage on Mustang and try to jet away, but a bright light implodes in the center of the Pax, enveloping the metal decks and crumpling the hull as energy spasms outward. The shock wave hits the destroyers and, crumpling their hulls, smashes them into one another. The Colossus shudders around us and we’re knocked through space as well, but her shielding holds. The Dejah Thoris drifts, lights dark. I can only pray that Mustang is alive. I bite the inside of my cheek to make me focus.
“Why didn’t you just use our guns,” Roque says, shaken by the loss of his men, of his destroyers, at being so outmaneuvered. “You could have crippled them….”
“I’m saving these guns,” I say.
“They won’t save you.” He turns back to me. “My fleet has yours in flight. They will decimate the remainder and return here and take the Colossus back. Then we’ll see then how well you hold a bridge.”
“Silly Poet. Haven’t you wondered where Sevro is?” Victra asks. “Don’t tell me you lost track of him in all this.” She nods to the screen where his fleet pursues the routed forces of the Moon Lords and Orion toward Jupiter. “He’s about to make his entry.”
When the battle began, the outermost of the inner four moons of Jupiter, Thebe, was in far rotation. But as the battle dragged on, her orbit brought her closer, and closer, taking her across the path of my now-retreating navy, just under twenty thousand kilometers from Io. Led by Antonia’s flagship, Roque’s fleet pursued, as they should have, to complete the destruction of my forces. What they did not anticipate was that my ships had always planned to bring them to Thebe, the proverbial dead horse.
While I negotiated with Romulus, teams of Helldivers were melting caverns into the face of barren Thebe. Now, as Roque’s battlecruisers and torchShips pass the moon, Sevro and six thousand soldiers in starShells pour out of the caverns. And out the other side of the moon pours two thousand leechCraft packed with fifty thousand Obsidians and forty thousand screaming Reds. Railguns spray. Flak deploys last minute. But my forces envelope the enemy, latching onto a their hulls like a cloud of Luna gutter mosquitos to burrow into their guts and claim the ships from the inside.
Yet even my victory carries betrayal. Romulus had Gold leechCraft of his own prepared to launch from the surface of the moon, so that he could capture ships as well to balance my gains. But I need the ships more than he. And my Reds collapsed the mouth of their tunnels at the same time Sevro launches. By the time he realizes the sabotage, my fleet will outnumber his.
“I could not lure you to an asteroid field, so I brought one to you,” I say to Roque as we watch the battle unfold.
“Well played,” Roque whispers. But we both know the plan works only because I have a hundred thousand Obsidian and he does not. At most, his entire fleet has ten thousand. Probably more like seven. Worse, how could he have known that I had so many when every other Sons of Ares attack has rested on the backs of Reds? Battles are won months before they are fought. I never had enough ships to beat him. But now my ships will continue to flee, continue to run away from his guns as my men carve his battlecruisers apart from the inside. Slowly his ships will become my ships and fire on the very vessels they’re in formation with. You can’t defend against that. He can vent the ships, but my men will have magnetic gear, breathing masks. He’ll only kill his own.
“The day is lost,” I say to the thin Imperator. But you can still save lives. Tell your fleet to stand down.”
He shakes his head.
“You’re in a corner, Poet,” Victra says. “There’s no getting out. Time to do the right thing. I know it’s been a while.”
“And destroy what’s left of my honor?” he asks quietly as a group of twenty men in starShells penetrate the rear hangar of a nearby destroyer. “I think not.”
“Honor?” Victra sneers. “What honor do you think you have? We were your friends and you gave us up. Not just to be killed. But to be put in boxes. To be electrocuted. Burned. Tortured night and day for a year.” Here in armor, it’s hard to imagine the blond warrior to have ever been a victim. But in her eyes there’s that special sadness that comes from seeing the void. From feeling cut away from the rest of humanity. Her voice is thick with emotion. “We were your friends.”
“I swore an oath to protect the Society, Victra. The same oath you both swore the day we stood before our betters and took the scar upon our faces. To protect the civilization that brought order to man. Look upon what you’ve done instead.” He eyes the Valkyrie behind us in disgust.
“You don’t live in a bedtime story, whimpering little sod,” she snaps. “You think any of them care about you? Antonia? The Jackal? The Sovereign?”
“No,” he says quietly. “I have no such illusions. But it’s not about them. It’s not about me. Not every life is meant to be warm. Sometimes the cold is our duty. Even if it pulls us from those we love.” He looks pityingly at her. “You’ll never be what Darrow wants. You have to know that.”
“You think I’m here for him?” she asks.
Roque frowns. “Then it’s revenge?”
“No,” she says angrily. “It’s more than that.”
“Who are you trying to fool?” Roque asks, jerking his head toward me. “Him or yourself?” The question catches Victra off guard.
“Roque, think of your men,” I say. “How many more have to die?”
“If you care so much for life, tell yours to stop firing,” Roque replies. “Tell them to fall in line and understand that life isn’t free. It isn’t without sacrifice. If all take what they want, how long will it be till there’s nothing left?”
It breaks me to hear him say those words.
My friend has always had his own way of things. His own tides that come in and out. It is not in his nature to hate. Nor was it in mine. Our worlds made us what we are, and all this pain we suffer is to fix the folly of those who came before, who shaped the world in their image and left us the ruin of their feast. Ships detonate in his irises. Washing his pale face with furious light.
“All this…,” he whispers, feeling the end coming. “Was she so lovely?”
“Yes. She was like you,” I say. “A dreamer.” He’s too young to look so old. Were it not for the lines on his face and the world between us, it would seem only yesterday that he crouched before me as I shivered on the floor of the Mars Castle after killing Julian and he told me that when you’re thrown in the deep, there’s only one choice. Keep swimming or drown. I should have loved him more. I would have done anything to keep him at my side and show him the love he deserves.
But life is the present and the future, not the past.
It’s as if we look at each other from distant shores and the river between widens and roars and darkens till our faces are pale shards of the moon in the deep night. More ideas of the boys we were than the men we are. I see the resolve forming in his face. The determination pulling him away from this life.
“You don’t have to die.”
“I have lost the invincible armada,” he says, stepping back, his hand tightening on his razor. Behind him, the display shows Sevro’s trap ruining the main body of his fleet. “How can I go on? How can I bear this shame?”
“I know shame. I watched my wife die,” I say. “Then I killed myself. Let them hang me to end it all. To escape the pain. I’ve felt that guilt every day since. This is not the way out.”
“My heart breaks for who you were,” he says. “For that boy who watched his wife die. My heart broke in that garden. It breaks now knowing all you suffered. But the only solace was my duty, and now that has been robbed from me. All the remittance I’ve attempted to make…gone. I love the Society. I love my people.” His voice softens. “Can’t you see that?”
“I can.”
“And you love yours.” It’s not judgment, not forgiveness that he gives me. It’s just a smile. “I cannot watch mine fade. I cannot watch it all burn.”
“It won’t.”
“It will. Our age is ending. I feel the days shortening. The brief light dimming upon the kingdom of man.”
“Roque…”
“Let him do it,” Victra says from behind me. “He chose his fate.” I hate her for being so cold even now. How can she not see that beneath his deeds, he’s a good man? He’s still our friend, despite what he’s done to us.
“I’m sorry for what happened, Victra. Remember me fondly.”
“I won’t.”
He favors her with a sad smile as he strips the Imperator badge from his left shoulder and clutches it in his hand, drawing his strength from it. But then he tosses it to the ground. There’s tears in his eyes as he strips away the other. “I do not deserve these. But I shall have glory by losing this day. More than you by vile conquest shall attain.”
“Roque, just listen to me. This not the end. This is the beginning. We can repair what’s broken. The worlds need Roque au Fabii.” I hesitate. “I need you.”
“There is no place for me in your world. We were brothers, but I would kill you, if only I had the power.”
I’m in a dream. Unable to change the forces that move around me. To stop the sand from slipping through my fingers. I set this into motion but didn’t have the heart or strength or cunning or whatever the hell I needed to stop it. No matter what I do or say, Roque was lost to me the moment he discovered what I am.
I step toward him, thinking I can take his razor from his hand without killing him, but he knows my intention and he holds up his off hand plaintively. As if to comfort me and beg me the mercy of letting him die as he lived. “Be still. Night hangs upon mine eyes.” He looks to me, eyes full with tears.
“Keep swimming, my friend,” I tell him.
With a gentle nod, he wraps his razor whip around his throat and stiffens his spine. “I am Roque au Fabii of the gens Fabii. My ancestors walked upon red Mars. They fell upon Old Earth. I have lost the day, but I have not lost myself. I will not be a prisoner.” His eyes close. His hand trembles. “I am the star in the night sky. I am the blade in the twilight. I am the god, the glory.” His breath shudders out. He is afraid. “I am the Gold.”
And there, on the bridge of his invincible warship as his famous fleet falls to ruin behind him, the Poet of Deimos takes his own life. Somewhere the wind howls and the darkness whispers that I’m running out of friends, running out of light. The blood slithers away from his body toward my boots. A shard of my own reflection trapped in its red fingers.