Victra is less shaken than I. She assumes command as I linger over Roque’s corpse. His lifeless eyes stare at the ground. Blood thunders in my ears. Yet the war rages on. Victra’s standing over the Blue operations pit, face drawn in determination.
“Does anyone contest that this ship now belongs to the Rising?” Not a sailor says a word. “Good. Follow orders and you’ll keep your post. If you can’t follow orders, stand up now and you’ll be a prisoner of war. If you say you can follow orders but don’t, we shoot you in the head. Choose.” Seven Blues stand. Holiday escorts them out of the pit. “Welcome to the Rising,” Victra says to the remainders. “The battle is far from won. Give me a direct link to Persephone’s Howl and Reynard. Main screen . ”
“Belay that,” I say. “Victra, make the call on your datapad. I don’t want to broadcast the fact that we have taken this ship just yet.”
Victra nods and punches her datapad several times. Orion and Daxo appear on the holo. The dark woman speaks first. “Victra, where is Darrow?”
“Here,” Victra says quickly. “What’s your status? Have you heard from Virginia?”
“A third of the enemy fleet is boarded. Virginia is aboard an escape pod, about to be picked up by the Echo of Ismenia. Sevro’s in the halls of their secondary flagship. Periodic reports. He’s making headway. Telemanuses and Raa are pinching….”
“An even match,” Daxo says. “We’ll need the Colossus to tilt the odds. My father and sisters have boarded the Pandora. They’re striking for Antonia….”
Their conversation feels a world away.
Through my grief, I feel Sefi approach me. She kneels beside Roque. “This man was your friend,” she says. I nod numbly. “He is not gone. He is here.” She touches her own heart. “He is there.” She points to the stars on the holo. I look over at her, surprised by the deep current she reveals to me. The respect she gives Roque now doesn’t heal my wounds, but it makes them feel less hollow. “Let him see,” she says, nodding to his eyes. The purest gold, they stare now at the ground. So I unscrew my gauntlet and close them with my bare fingers. Sefi smiles and I gain my feet beside her.
“Pandora is moving lateral to sector D-6, ” Orion says of Antonia’s ship. On the display, the Severus-Julii ships are separating from the Sword Armada and firing at each other to try and skin away the leechCraft which festoon them. She’s shifting power to engines and away from shields and angling away from the engagement. “ Now D-7 .”
“She’s abandoning them,” Victra says, dumbfounded. “The little shit is saving her own hide.” The Society Praetors must not believe what they’re seeing. Even if I brought the Colossus to bear on them, the fleets would be evenly matched. The battle would last another twelve hours and exhaust both our fleets. Now it crumbles apart.
Whether by cowardice or betrayal, I don’t know, but Antonia just gave us the battle on a silver platter.
“She’s left us a gap,” Orion says. Her eyes go distant as she syncs with her ship captains and her own vessel, thrusting the huge capital ships into the region formerly occupied by Antonia, which brings them into the flank of the main enemy body.
“Do not let her escape!” Victra snarls.
But neither Daxo nor Orion can spare the ships to pursue Antonia. They’re too busy taking advantage of her absence. “We can catch her,” Victra says to herself. “Engines, prepare to give us sixty percent thrust, escalate by ten percent over five. Helmsman, set our course for the Pandora. ”
I make a quick assessment. Of our small battle at the rear of the warzone, we’re the only ship still battle-ready. The rest are drifting rubble. But the Colossus has not yet made an action or a declaration that its bridge has been taken by the Rising. Which means we have an opportunity.
“Belay that,” I snap.
“What?” Victra wheels on me. “Darrow, we have to catch her.”
“There’s something else that needs doing.”
“She’ll escape!”
“And we’ll hunt her down.”
“Not if she gets enough of a lead. We’ll be tied here for hours. You promised me my sister.”
“And I’ll deliver. Think beyond yourself,” I say. “Bridge shield down.” I ignore the wrathful woman’s glare and walk past Roque’s body to peer into the blackness of space as the metal shielding beyond the glass viewports slides into the wall. In the far distance ships flicker and flash against the marble backdrop of Jupiter. Io is beneath us, and far to our left, the city moon of Ganymede glows, large as a plum.
“Holiday, recall all available infantry to protect the bridge and make safe the vessel. Sefi make sure no one gets through that door. Helmsman, set course for Ganymede. Do not make any Society ships aware the bridge is taken. Do I make myself clear? No broadcasts.” The Blues follow my instructions.
“To Ganymede?” Victra asks, eying her sister’s ship. “But Antonia, the battle…”
“The battle is won. Your sister made sure of that.”
“Then what are we doing?”
Our ship’s engines throb and we untangle ourselves from the wreckage of the Pax and Mustang’s devastated strike group. “Winning the next war. Excuse me.”
I wipe blood from my armored kneecap onto my face and let my helmet slither over my head. The HUD display expands. I wait. And then, as expected, a call from Romulus comes. I let it flash on the left hand side of my screen, altering my breathing so it seems I’ve been running. I accept the call. His face expands over the left eighth of my visor’s vision. He’s in a firefight, but my vision is as constricted as his. All I can see is his face in his helmet. “Darrow. Where are you?”
“In the halls,” I say. I pant and crouch on a knee as if taking respite. “Pressing for the Colossus ’s bridge . ”
“You’re not in yet?”
“Roque initiated lockdown protocol. It’s thick going,” I say.
“Darrow, listen carefully. The Colossus has altered trajectory and is headed for Ganymede.”
“The docks,” I whisper intensely. “He’s going for the docks. Can any ships intercept?”
“No! They’re out of position. If Octavia can’t win , she’ll ruin us. Those docks are my people’s future. You must take that bridge at all cost!”
“I will…but Romulus. He has nukes on board. What if it’s not just the docks he’s going for?”
Romulus pales. “Stop him. Please. Your people are down there too.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“Thank you, Darrow. And good luck. First cohort, on me…”
The connection dies. I remove my helmet. My men stare at me. They haven’t heard the conversation, but they know what I’m doing now. “You’re going to destroy Romulus’s dockyards around Ganymede,” Victra says.
“Holy shit,” Holiday mutters. “Holy shit.”
“I’m not destroying anything,” I reply. “I’m fighting my way through corridors. Trying to reach the bridge. Roque is ordering this move as his last act of violence before I claim his command.” Victra’s eyes light up, but even she has reservations.
“If Romulus finds out, if he even suspects, he’ll fire on our forces and everything we’ve won today goes to ash.”
“And who will tell him?” I ask. I look around the bridge. “Who will tell him?” I look to Holiday. “If anyone sends a signal out, shoot them in the head. Wipe the video memory from the whole ship.”
If I ruin Ganymede’s dockyards the Rim won’t be able to threaten us for fifty years. Romulus is an ally today, but I know he will threaten the core if the Rising succeeds. If I must give Roque for this victory, if I must give the Sons on these moons, I will take something in return. I look down. Red bootprints follow my path. I didn’t even realize I’d stepped in Roque’s blood.
We carve our way free of the debris formed by Mustang’s fleet and mine and break away from Jupiter toward Ganymede, leaving her behind. I feel the pulsing desperation as the Moon Lords send their fastest craft to intercept us. We shoot them down. All the pride and hope of Romulus’s people are in the rivets and assembly lines and electric shops of that dull gray ring of metal. All their promises of power and future independence are at my mercy.
When I reach the sparkling gem that is Ganymede, I bring the Colossus parallel to the monument of industry they’ve built in orbit at her equator. The Valkyrie gather behind us at the viewport. Sefi staring in awe at the majesty and triumph of Gold will. Two hundred kilometers of docks. Hundreds of haulers and freighters. Birthplace of the greatest ships in the Sol System including the Colossus herself. Like any good monster of myth, the girl must eat her mother before being free to pursue her true destiny. That destiny is leading the assault on the Core.
“Men built this?” Sefi asks with quiet reverence. Many of her Valkyrie have fallen to a knee to watch in wonder.
“My people built it,” I say. “Reds.”
“It took two hundred fifty years…It’s how old the first dock there is,” Victra says, shoulder to shoulder with me. Hundreds of escape pods flower out from her metal carapace. They know why we’re here. They’re evacuating the senior administrators, the overseers. I’m under no delusion. I know who will die when we fire.
“There’s still going to be thousands of Reds on there.” Holiday says quietly to me. “Oranges, Blues…Grays.”
“He knows that,” Victra says.
Holiday doesn’t leave my side. “You sure you want to do this, sir?”
“Want to?” I ask hollowly. “Since when has any of this been about what we want?” I turn to the helmsman, about to give the order when Victra puts a hand on my shoulder.
“Share the load, darling. This one’s on me.” Her Aureate voice rings clear and loud. “Helmsman, open fire with all port batteries. Launch tubes twenty-one through fifty at their center-line.”
Together, we stand shoulder to shoulder and watch the warship lay ruin to the defenseless dock. Sefi stares out in profound awe. She has watched the holos of ship warfare, but her war until now, has been narrow halls and men and gunfire. This is the first time they see what a vessel of war can do. And for the first time, I see her frightened.
It’s a crime that the marvel should die like this. No song. Nothing but silence and the unblinking gaze of the stars to herald the end of one of the great monuments of the Golden Age. And I hear in the back of my mind, that age old truth of darkness whispering to me.
Death begets death begets death…
The moment is sadder than I wanted. So I turn to Sefi as the dock continues to fall apart. The shattered bits drifting down to the moon, where they will fall into the sea or upon the cities of Ganymede.
“The ship must be renamed,” I say, “I would like you to choose.”
Her face is stained with white light.
“Tyr Morga,” she says without hesitation.
“What’s that mean?” Holiday asks.
I look back out the viewport as explosions ripple through the dock and her escape pods flare against the atmosphere of Ganymede. “It means Morning Star.”