Morning Star

  “But that one is Red. They are your family…”

  Rollo frowns at the bare truth.

  “Save the pity, Ragnar,” Victra says. “That’s Syndicate crank he’s puffing. Most of them would slit your throat for an afternoon high. They’re empty flesh.”

  “Empty what?” I say, turning back to her.

  She’s caught off guard by the sharpness of my tone, but she’s loath to back off. So she doubles down instinctively. “Empty flesh, darling,” she repeats. “Part of being human is having dignity. They don’t. They carved it out themselves. That was their choice, not Golds’. Even if it’s easy to blame them for everything. So why should they deserve my pity?”

  “Because not everyone is you. Or had your birth.”

  She doesn’t reply. Rollo clears his throat, skeptical now about our disguises. “Lady’s right about the slit-your-throat part. Most of ’em were imported laborers. Like me. Not counting the wife, I’ve got plus three in New Thebes that I send money back to, but I can’t go home till my contract’s up. Got four years left. These slags have given up on tryin’ to get back.”

  “Four years?” Victra asks dubiously. “You said you were already here eight.”

  “Gotta pay for my transit.”

  She stares at him quizzically.

  “Company doesn’t cover it. Shoulda read the fine print. Sure, it was my choice to come up here.” He nods to the vagrants. “Was theirs too. But when the only other choice is starving.” He shrugs as if we all know the answer. “These slags just got unlucky on the job. Lost legs. Arms. Company doesn’t cover prosthetics, least not decent ones….”

  “What about Carvers?” I ask.

  He scoffs. “And who the hell do you know that can afford flesh work?”

  I didn’t even think of the cost. Reminds me of how distant I am from so many of the people I claim to fight for. Here’s a Red, one of my own more or less, and I don’t even know what type of food is popular in his culture.

  “What company do you work for?” Victra asks.

  “Why, Julii Industries, of course.”

  —

  I watch the metal jungle pass outside the dirty duroglass window as the tram pulls away from the station. Victra sits down next to me, a troubled look on her face. But I’m a world away from her, my friends. Lost in memory. I’ve been to the Hive before with ArchGovernor Augustus and Mustang. He brought the lancers to meet with Society economic ministers to discuss modernizing the moon’s infrastructure. After the meetings she and I snuck away to the moon’s famous aquarium. I’d rented it out at absurd cost and arranged a meal and wine to be served to us in front of the orca tank. Mustang always liked natural creatures more than Carved ones.

  I’ve traded fifty-year-old wines and Pink valets for a grimmer world with rusting bones and rebel thugs. This is the real world. Not the dream the Golds live in. Today I feel the silent screams of a civilization that has been stepped on for hundreds of years.

  Our path skirts around the edges of the Hollows, the center of the moon where the latticework of cage slum apartments festers without gravity. To go there would be to risk falling into the middle of the Syndicate street war against the Sons of Ares. And to go any higher into the midColor levels would be to risk Society marines and their security infrastructure of cameras and holoScanners.

  Instead, we pass through the hinterlands of maintenance levels between the Hollows and the Needles, where Reds and Oranges keep the moon running. Our tram, driven by a Sons sympathizer, speeds through its stops. The faces of waiting workers blur together as we pass. A pastiche of eyes. But faces all gray. Not the color of metal, but the color of old ash in a campfire. Ash faces. Ash clothes. Ash lives.

  But as the tunnel swallows our tram, color erupts around us. Graffiti and years of rage bleeding out from the ribbed and cracking walls of its once gray throat. Profanity in fifteen dialects. Golds ripped open in a dozen dark ways. And to the right of a crude sketch of a reaper’s scythe decapitating Octavia au Lune is an image of Eo hanging from the gallows in digital paint, hair aflame, “Break the Chains” written diagonally. It’s a single glowing flower among the weeds of hate. A knot forms in my throat.

  Half an hour after we set out, our tram grinds to a halt outside a deserted lowColor industrial hub where thousands of workers should diverge from their early-morning commute from the Stacks to attend their functions. But now it’s still as a cemetery. Trash litters the metal floors. HoloCans still flash with the Society’s news programs. A cup sits on a table in a café, steam still rising off the top of the beverage. The Sons have cleared the way only a few minutes before. Shows the extent of their influence here.

  When we leave, life will return to the place. But after we plant the bombs we’ve brought with us? After we destroy the manufacturing, won’t all the men and women we intend to help be just as unemployed as those poor creatures in the tram station? If work is their reason for being, what happens when we take it away? I’d voice my concerns to Sevro, but he’s a driven arrow. As dogmatic as I once was. And to question him aloud seems a betrayal of our friendship. He’s always trusted me blindly. So am I the worse friend for having doubts in him?

  We pass through several gravLifts into a garage for garbage disposal haulers, also owned by Julii Industries. I catch Victra wiping dirt off the family crest on one of the doors. The speared sun is worn and faded. The few dozen Red and Orange workers of the facility pretend not to notice our group as we file into one of the hauler bays. Inside, at the base of two huge haulers, we find a small army of Sons of Ares. More than six hundred.

  They’re not soldiers. Not like us. Most are men, but there’s a scattering of women, mostly younger Reds and Oranges forced to migrate here for work to feed Mars-side families. Their weapons are shoddy. Some stand. Other are seated, turning from conversations to see our pack of Obsidian killers stalking across the metal deck, carrying bags of gear and pushing two mysterious carts. A small sadness grows in me. Whatever they do, wherever they go, their lives will be stained by this day. If it were my duty to address them, I’d warn them the burden they’re taking on, the evil they’ll be letting into their lives. I’d say it’s nicer to hear about glorious victories in war than to witness them. Than to feel the weird unreality of lying in bed every morning knowing you’ve killed a man, knowing a friend is gone.

  But I say nothing. My place now is beside Ragnar and Victra, behind Sevro as he spits out his gum and stalks forward, giving me a wink and an elbow in the side, to stand in front of the small army. His army. He’s tiny for an Obsidian male, but still scarred and tattooed and terrifying to this company of small-handed garbage men and hunched tower welders. He tilts his head forward, eyes smoldering behind his black contacts. Wolf tattoos looking evil against his pale skin in the industrial light.

  “Greetings, grease monkeys.” His voice rumbles, low and predatory. “You might be wondering why Ares has sent a pack of hardcore nasties like us to this tin shithole.” The Sons look to one another nervously. “We aren’t here to cuddle. We aren’t here to inspire you or give long-ass speeches like the bloodydamn Sovereign.” He snaps his fingers. Pebble and Clown wheel the carts forward and unlatch the tops. The hinges squeal open to reveal mining explosives. “We’re here to blow shit up.” He throws open his arms and cackles. “Any questions?”

  I float in the back of the trash collector with the Howlers. It’s dark. The night vision of my optics shows the garbage that orbits us in shadowy green. Banana peels. Toy packaging. Coffee grounds. Victra makes a gagging sound over the com as toilet paper sticks to her face. Her mask is a demonHelm. Like mine, it’s pupil black and shaped subtly like a screaming demon face. Fitchner managed to steal them from Luna’s armories for the Sons more than a year back. With them, we can see most spectrums, amplify sound, track one another’s coordinates, access maps, and communicate silently. My friends around me are in all black. We wear no mechanized armor, only thin scarabSkin over our bodies that will stop knives and occasional
projectiles. We have no gravBoots or pulseArmor. Nothing that will slow us, cause noise, or trip sensors. We wear oxygen tanks with air enough for forty minutes. I finish adjusting Ragnar’s harness and look to my datapad. The two Reds crewing the old trash collector are giving us a countdown. When it reaches one, Sevro says, “Tuck your sacks and pop your cloaks.”

  I activate my ghostCloak and the world warps, distorted by the cloak. It’s like looking through refracted, dirty water, and I already feel the battery pack heating up against my tailbone. The cloak’s good for short bursts. But it burns up small batteries like the ones we pack and needs time to cool and recharge. I grope for Sevro and Victra’s hands, managing to grasp them in time. The rest partner up as well. I don’t remember feeling so frightened before the Iron Rain. Was I braver then? Maybe just more naïve.

  “Hold tight. We’re in for some chop,” Sevro says. “Popping top in three…two…” I tighten my grip on his hand. “…one.”

  The collector’s door retracts silently, bathing us in the amber light of a holoDisplay screen on a nearby skyscraper. There’s a burst of air and my world spins as the trash collector ejects its load of garbage from the back of its hold. We’re like seed chaff thrown into the city. Spinning with debris through a kaleidoscope world of towers and advertisements. Hundreds of ships funneling along avenues. All a flashing, liquid blur. We continue to spin head over heel to mask our signatures.

  Over the com, I hear the grousing of a Blue traffic controller, annoyed at the spilled trash. Soon there’s a company Copper on the line threatening to fire the incompetent drivers. But it’s what I don’t hear that makes me smile. The police channels drone on their usual slant, reporting a Syndicate airjacking in the Hive, a grisly murder in the ancient art museum near the Park Plaza, a datacenter robbery in the Banking Cluster. They haven’t seen us amidst the debris.

  We slow our spin gradually using small thrusters in our helmets. Bursts of air bring us to a steady drift. Silent in the vacuum. We’re on target. Along with the rest of the trash, we’re about to impact on the side of a steel tower. Has to be a clean landing. Victra curses as we drift closer, closer. My fingers tremble. Don’t bounce. Don’t bounce.

  “Release,” Sevro orders.

  I pull my hands from his and Victra’s, and the three of us impact jarringly against the steel. The trash around us bounds off the metal, cartwheeling backward at odd angles. Sevro and Victra stick, compliments of the magnets in their gloves, but a piece of debris impacting in front of me bounces off the steel and hits me in the thigh, altering my trajectory. Tipping me sideways, hands windmilling for a grip, which causes me to spin.

  My feet hit first and I bounce backward toward space, cursing.

  “Sevro!” I shout.

  “Victra. Get him.”

  A hand grabs my foot, jerking me to a halt. I look down and see a warped invisible form grasping my leg. Victra. Carefully, she pulls my weightless body back to the wall so I can clamp my own magnets onto the steel. Spots race across my vision. The city is all around us. It’s dreadful in its silence, in its colors, in its inhuman metal landscape. It feels more like an ancient alien artifact than a place for humans.

  “Slow it down.” Victra’s voice crackles in my helmet. “Darrow. You’re hyperventilating. Breathe with me. In. Out. In…” I force my lungs to breathe in sync with her. The spots soon fade. I open my eyes, face inches from the steel.

  “You shit your suit or something?” Sevro asks.

  “I’m good,” I say. “A little rusty.”

  “Ugh. Pun intended, I’m sure.” Ragnar and the rest of the Howlers land thirty meters beneath us on the wall. Pebble waves up to me. “Got three hundred meters to go. Let’s climb, you pixies.”

  Lights glow behind the glass of Quicksilver’s double-helix towers. Connecting the double helixes are nearly two hundred levels of offices. I can make out shapes moving inside at computer terminals. I zoom in with my optics to watch the stock traders sitting in their offices, their assistants moving to and fro, analysts signaling furiously on holographic trading boards that communicate with the markets on Luna. Silvers, all. They remind me of industrious bees.

  “Makes me miss the boys,” Victra says. Takes me a moment to realize she’s not talking about the Silvers. The last time she and I tried this tactic, Tactus and Roque were with us. We infiltrated Karnus’s flagship from vacuum as he refueled at an asteroid base during the Academy’s mock war. We cut through his hull with aims of kidnapping him to eliminate his team. But it was a trap and I narrowly escaped with the help of my friends, a broken arm my only reward for the gambit.

  It takes us five minutes to climb from our landing place to the peak of the tower, where it becomes a large crescent. We don’t go hand over hand, so climbing isn’t the true term. The magnets in our gloves have fluctuating positive and negative currents that allow us to roll up the side of the tower like we have wheels in our palms. The toughest part of the ascent, or descent, or whatever you’d call it in the null grav, is the crescent slope at the extreme height or end of the tower. We have to cling to a narrow metal support beam that extends out among a ceiling of glass, much like the stem of a leaf. Beneath our bellies and through the glass lies Quicksilver’s famous museum. And above us, just over the peak of Quicksilver’s tower, hangs Mars.

  My planet seems larger than space. Larger than anything ever could be. A world of billions of souls, of designer oceans, mountains, and more irrigable acres of dry land than Earth ever had. It’s night on this side of the world. And you could never know that millions of kilometers of tunnels wind through the bones of the planet, that even as its surface glows with the lights of the Thousand Cities of Mars, there is a pulse unseen, a tide that is rising. But now it looks peaceful. War a distant, impossible thing. I wonder what a poet would say in this moment. What Roque would whisper into the air. Something about the calm before the storm. Or a heartbeat among the deep. But then there’s a flash. It startles me. A spasm of light that flares white, then erodes into devilish neon as a mushroom grows in the planet’s blackness.

  “Do you see that?” I ask over the coms, blinking away the cigar burn the distant detonation made in my vision. Our coms crackle with curses as the others turn to see.

  “Shit,” Sevro murmurs. “New Thebes?”

  “No,” Pebble answers. “Farther north. That’s the Aventine Peninsula. So it’s probably Cyprion. Last intel said the Red Legion was moving toward the city.”

  Then comes another flash. And the seven of us hunker motionless on the crest of the building, watching as a second nuclear bomb detonates a thumb’s distance away from the first.

  “Bloodydamn. Is it us or them?” I ask. “Sevro!”

  “I don’t know,” Sevro says impatiently.

  “You don’t know?” Victra asks.

  How could he not know? I want to shout. But I grasp the answer, because Dancer’s words now haunt me. “Sevro’s not running this war,” he told me, weeks ago after another failed Howler mission. “He’s just a man pouring gas on the fire.” Maybe I didn’t understand how far gone this war is, how far reaching the chaos has become.

  Could I have been wrong to trust him so blindly? I watch his expressionless mask. The skin of his armor drinks in the colors of the city around, reflecting nothing. An abyss for light. He turns slowly from the explosion and begins to climb again. Already moving on.

  “HoloNews has it,” Pebble says. “Fast. They say Red Legion used nukes against Gold forces near Cyprion. Least that’s the story.”

  “Bloodydamn liars,” Clown snaps. “Another bait and switch.”

  “Where would Red Legion get nukes?” Victra asks. Harmony would use them if she had any. But I wager it was Gold using the bombs on Red Legion instead.

  “Doesn’t mean shit to us now. Lock it up,” Sevro says. “Still got to do what we came to do. Get your asses in gear.” Numbly, we obey. When we reach our entry zone on the crescent of the double helix tower, rehearsed routine takes over. I pull
a small acid flask from the pack on Victra’s back. Sevro releases a nanocam no larger than my fingernail into the air, where it hovers above the glass, scanning for life inside the museum. There is none—not a surprise at 03:00. He pulls out a pulseGenerator and waits for Pebble to finish her work on her datapad.

  “What’s what, Pebble?” he asks impatiently.

  “Codes worked. I’m in the system,” she says. “Just have to find the right zone. There it is. Laser grid is…down. Thermal cams are…frozen. Heartbeat sensors are…off. Congratulations, everyone. We’re officially ghosts! So long as no one manually pulls an alarm.”

  Sevro activates the pulseGenerator and a faint iridescent bubble blooms around us, creating a seal, so that the vacuum of space doesn’t invade the building with us. Would be a quick way to be discovered. I put a small suction cup on the center of the glass then open the acid container and apply the foam to the window in a two-meter-by-two-meter box around the suction cup. The acid bubbles as it eats through the glass, creating an opening. With a small rush of air from the building into our pulseField, the glass pane pops up where Victra grabs it to keep it from flying into space.

  “Rags first,” Sevro says. It’s a hundred meters to the museum floor below.

  Ragnar clamps a rappelling winch to the edge of the glass and clips his harness to the magnetic wire. Pulling his razor out, he reactivates his ghostCloak and pushes through the hole. It’s disturbing to the senses seeing his near-invisible form accelerate down to the floor, gripped by the skyhook’s artificial gravity while I’m still floating. He looks a demon made of the heat that shimmers above the desert on a summer day.

  “Clear.”

  Sevro follows. “Break an arm,” Victra says, pushing me into the hole after him. I float forward, then feel myself gripped by gravity as I cross the boundary into the room. I slide down the wire, picking up speed. My stomach lurches at the sudden influx of weight, food sloshing around. I land hard on the ground, almost twisting my ankle as I pull up my silenced scorcher and search for contacts. The rest of the Howlers land behind me. We crouch back to back in the grand hall. The floor is gray marble. The length of the hall is impossible to gauge, because it curves according to the crescent, bowing upward and out of sight, playing with gravity and giving me a sense of vertigo. Metal relics tower around us. Old rockets from man’s Pioneer Age. The coat of arms of the Luna Company marks the hull of a gray probe near Ragnar. It looks decidedly like Octavia au Lune’s house crest.