Morning Star

I help unbuckle Mustang’s pulseArmor in the cargo hold. “Cold gear is in here.” I gesture to a large plastic box. “Boots in there.”

“Quicksilver gave you the keys to his armory?” she asks, eying the winged heel on the boxes. “How many fingers did it cost him?”

“None,” I say. “He’s a Son of Ares.”

“What now?”

I grin. Comforting knowing the world isn’t an open book for her. The engines rumble and the ship rises underneath us. “Get dressed and join us in the cabin.” I leave her behind to change in private. I was more gruff than I intended. But it felt strange smiling in her presence. I find Ragnar leaning back in his chair in the passenger cabin eating chocolates, white boots up on the adjacent armrest. “No offense, but what the hell are you doing?” Holiday asks me. She stands, arms crossed, between the cockpit and the passenger cabin. “Sir.”

“Taking a risk,” I say. “I know it might seem strange to you, Holiday. But I go back with her.”

“She’s the definition of the elite. Worse than Victra. Her father—”

“Killed my wife,” I say. “So if I can stomach it, so can you.” Holiday makes a whistling sound and heads back to the cabin, unhappy with our new ally.

“So the Mustang joined our quest,” Ragnar says.

“She’s getting dressed,” I reply. “You had no right to let Kavax go. Much less tell him where we would be. What if they gave us up, Ragnar? What if they ambushed us? You would never have seen your home. If they find out we’re there, they’ll never let your people off the surface. They’ll kill them all. Did you think of that?”

He eats another chocolate. “A man thinks he can fly, but he is afraid to jump. A poor friend pushes him from behind.” He looks up at me. “A good friend jumps with.”

“You’ve been reading Stoneside, haven’t you?”

Ragnar nods. “Theodora gave it to me. Lorn au Arcos was a great man.”

“He’d be glad you think so, but take everything with a grain of salt. The biographer took some liberties. Especially in his early life.”

“Lorn would have told you that we need her. Now, in war. And after, in peace. If we do not bring her to our cause, then we will not win until every Gold is dead. That is not why I fight.”

Ragnar rises to greet Mustang as she joins us. The last time they stood eye to eye, she had a gun pointed at his head. “Ragnar, you’ve been busy since I last saw you. Not a Gold alive doesn’t know and fear your name. Thank you for releasing Kavax.”

“Family is dear,” Ragnar says. “But I warn you. We go to my lands. You are under my protection. If you play your tricks, if you play your games, that protection is forfeit. And even you will not survive long on the ice without me, daughter of the lion. Do you understand?”

Mustang bows her head respectfully. “I do. And I will repay your faith in me, Ragnar. I promise you that.”

“Enough chatter. Time to buckle up,” Holiday snaps from the cabin. Vesta’s synced with the ship and pushing out of the hangar. We find our seats. There’s twenty to choose from, but Mustang takes the one next to me in the left aisle. Her hand grazes my hip accidentally as she reaches for her seat harness.

Our ship departs the hangar, silently floating forward into the vacuum of the dim subcutaneous industrial world of Phobos. Pipes and loading docks and garbage bays as far as we can see. Closed off to the stars and the light of the sun. Few ships as lovely as ours have ever flown so far beneath the surface of Phobos. The word LowSector is rendered in white paint over an industrial transport hub where men pour into ships, and the ships trundle up out of this dim world toward the sector gates that the Sons have breached.

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.”

“Like you said, I’m going to the Valkyrie Spires for an army. Orion and you might still have the remnants of my fleet. But we will need more ships than that. Sevro is waiting in the ventilation system of the hangars. When the assault forces land to take back the military spire and the Needles, they’ll leave their shuttles behind in those hangars. Sevro will descend from his hiding place, hijack the shuttles, and return them home to their ships, packed with all the Sons we have left.”

“And you honestly believe you can control the Obsidian?” she asks.

“Not me. Him.” I nod to Ragnar. “They live in fear of their ‘Gods’ in the Board of Quality Control’s Asgard Station. Golds in suits of armor playing at Odin and Freya. Same way that I lived in fear of the Grays in the Pot. As we were cowed by the Proctors. Ragnar’s going to show them just how mortal their Gods really are.”

“How?”

“We will kill them,” Ragnar says. “I have sent friends ahead, months ago, to spread the truth. We will return to my mother and my sister as heroes, and I will tell them their gods are false with my own tongue. I will show them how to fly. I will give them weapons and this ship will carry them to Asgard and we will conquer it as Darrow conquered Olympus. Then we will free the other tribes and carry them away from this land on Quicksilver’s ships.”

“That’s why you have a gorydamn armory back there,” Mustang says.

“What do you think?” I ask her. “Possible?”

“Insane,” she says, awed by the audacity of it. “Might be possible, though. Only if Ragnar can actually control them.”

“I will not control. I will lead.” He says it with quiet certainty.

Mustang admires the man for a moment. “I believe you will.”

I watch Ragnar as he looks back out the window. What passes behind those dark eyes? This is the first time I’ve felt like he’s not telling me something. He already deceived me by releasing Kavax. What else does he plan?

We listen in tense silence to the radio waves crackle with yacht captains requesting docking clearance on the military frigates instead of continuing down to the planet. Connections are used. Bribes offered. Strings pulled. Men weep and beg. These civilians are discovering that their place in the world is smaller than they imagined. They do not matter. In war, men lose what makes them great. Their creativity. Their wisdom. Their joy. All that’s left is their utility. War is not monstrous for making corpses of men so much as it is for making machines of them. And woe to those who have no use in war except to feed the machines.

The Peerless Scarred know this cold truth. And they have trained for centuries for this new age of war. Killing in the Passage. Struggling through the deprivation of the Institute so that they might have worth when war comes. Time for Pixies with deep pockets and expensive tastes to appreciate the realities of life: you do not matter unless you can kill.

The bill, as Lorn often said, comes at the end. Now the Pixies pay.

A Gold Praetor’s voice cuts through the speakers of our ship, ordering the refugee ships to redirect toward authorized transit lanes and steer clear the navy warships or they will be fired upon. The Praetor cannot afford unauthorized vessels within one hundred kilometers of her ship. They could carry bombs. Could carry Sons of Ares. Two yachts ignore the warnings and are ripped apart as one of the cruisers fires railguns into their hulls. The Praetor repeats her order. This time it is obeyed. I look over at Mustang and wonder what she thinks of this. Of me. Wishing we could be somewhere quiet where a thousand things didn’t pull at us. Where I ask about her instead of the war.

“Feels like the end of the world,” she says.

“No.” I shake my head. “It is the beginning of a new one. I have to believe that.”

The planetscape below is blue and spackled white as we pretend to follow the designated coordinates along the western hemisphere at the equator. Tiny green islands ringed with tan beaches wink up at us from the indigo waters of the Thermic Sea. Beneath, ships jerk and burn as they hit atmosphere before us. Like phosphorous firecrackers Eo and I played with as children, kicking spasmodically and glowing orange, then blue, as heat friction builds along their shields. Our Blue veers us away, following a series of other ships who depart the general flow of traffic for their own homes.

Soon, Phobos is half a planet away. The continents pass beneath. One by one the other ships descend and we’re left alone on our journey to the uncivilized pole, flying past several dozen Society satellites that monitor the southernmost continent. They too have been hacked into recycling information pulled from three years ago. We’re invisible, for now. Not just to our enemies but to our friends. Mustang leans from her chair, peering up into the cockpit. “What is that?” She gestures to the sensor display. A single dot follows behind us.

“Another refugee ship from Phobos,” the pilot answers. “Civilian vessel. No weapons.” But it’s closing fast. Trailing behind us by two hundred kilometers.

“If it’s a civilian vessel, why did it just appear on our sensors?” Mustang asks.

“It could have sensor shielding. Dampeners,” Holiday says warily.

The ship closes to forty kilometers. Something is wrong here. “Civilian vessels don’t have that sort of acceleration,” Mustang says.

“Dive,” I say. “Get us through the atmosphere now. Holiday on the gun.”

The Blue slips into defense protocols, increasing our speed, strengthening our rear shields. We hit atmosphere. My teeth rattle together. The ship’s electronic voice suggests passengers find their seats. Holiday stumbles up, rushing past us to the tailgun. Then a warning siren trills as the ship behind us morphs on the radar display, sharp contours of hidden weapons blossoming from its formerly smooth hull. It follows us into atmosphere, and it fires.

Our pilot twists her thin hands in the gel controls. My stomach lurches. Hypersonic depleted uranium shells scar the canvas of clouds and icy terrain, superheating as they streak past. The ship jerks as we hit atmosphere ourselves. Our pilot continues to juke, twitching her fingers in the electric gel, face placid and lost in her dance with the pursuing craft. Her eyes distant from her body. A single droplet of sweat beading on her right temple and trickling down her jaw. Then a gray blur rips into the cockpit and she explodes in a shower of meat. Spattering the viewports and my face with blood. The uranium shell takes off the top half of her body, then rips through the floor. A second shell the size of a child’s head screams through the ship between Mustang and me. Punching a hole in the floor and ceiling. Wind shrieks. Emergency masks fall into our laps. Warning sirens warble as pressure rushes from our ship, whipping our hair. I see the blackness of the ocean through the hole in the floor. Stars through the hole in the ceiling as our oxygen leaks out. The pursuing ship continues to fire into our dying ship. I huddle in terror with my hands over my head, teeth locked together, everything human in me screaming.

Laughter evil and inhuman rumbles so loud I think it’s coming from the buffeting wind. But it comes from Ragnar, his head tilted back as he laughs to his gods. “Odin knows we are coming to kill him. Even false Gods do not die easily!” He throws himself from his seat and runs down the hall, laughing insanely, not listening as I shout for him to sit down. Shells whisper past him. “I am coming, Odin! I am coming for you!”

Mustang dons her emergency mask and pushes the release on her safety webbing before I can gather my thoughts. The ship bucks, slamming her into the ceiling and the floor hard enough to crack the skull of any but an Aureate. Blood spills over her forehead from a gash at her hairline and she clutches to the floor, waiting till the ship rolls again to angle herself so that she can use gravity to fall into the co-pilot chair. She lands awkwardly against the armrests but manages to drag herself into the seat and buckle in. More warning lights pulse on the blood-drenched console. I look back down the hall to see if Ragnar and Holiday are alive only to see a trio of shells savage the room behind us. My teeth clatter in my skull. Gut vibrating with the champagne flutes in the cabinet to my left. I can’t do anything but hold on as Mustang tries to arrest our fall through orbit. The seat’s gel webbing tightens against my rib cage. I feel the g-forces crushing me. Time seems to slow as the world beneath swells. We’re through the clouds. On the sensor I see something small zip away from our ship and collide into the one trailing. Light flares behind us. Snow and mountains and ice floes dilate till they’re all I can see through the broken cockpit window. Wind howls, shatteringly cold against my face. “Brace for impact,” Mustang shouts over it. “In five…”

We plummet toward a sheaf of ice floating in the middle of the sea. On the horizon, a bloody ribbon of red ties the twilight sky to the ragged coastline of volcanic rock. A giant man stands atop the rock. Black and huge against the red light. I blink, wondering if my mind is playing tricks on me. If I’m seeing Fitchner before my death. The man’s mouth is an open dark chasm into which no light escapes.

“Darrow, tuck in!” Mustang shouts. I lower my head between my knees, wrap my arms around it. “Three…two…one.”

Our ship punches into the ice.