Morning Star

  And when they analyze the visual evidence of our little vacuum escape, they’ll see my face and Sevro’s. Then Jackal himself will come, or he’ll send Antonia or Lilath to hunt me down with their Boneriders.

  The clock’s ticking.

  But that’s supposing the authorities suspect that only Quicksilver was kidnapped. I don’t know why Mustang and Cassius were meeting, but I have to assume the Jackal doesn’t know about it. That’s why I used our jammers. So the security cameras outside of Quicksilver’s control wouldn’t ID Kavax. If the Jackal saw him here, he’d know something was amiss with his alliance with the Sovereign and Quicksilver. And I want to keep that card in my pocket till I know how best to use it and can speak with Mustang.

  But what will the Sovereign think when Cassius calls her to tell her Moira is dead? And what is Mustang’s place here? There are too many questions. Too many things I don’t know. But what haunts me as we run down metal halls, as my friends go to patch wounds and we pass armories where dozens of Reds and Browns and Oranges load weapons and buckle armor, is what she said.

  “I have the Pax. Orion is alive.”

  With her, that could mean a dozen things, and the only one who will know is Kavax. I need to ask him, but Ragnar’s already taken him down another hall to the Sons lockup and Sevro’s stopped rattling off orders to others to address me. “Reap, they’re gonna hit us, and hit us hard,” he’s saying. “You know Legion military procedures better than I do. Get to the datacenter, fastlike. Give me a timetable and their plan of attack. We can’t stop them, but we can buy time.”

  “Time for what?” I ask.

  “To blow the bombs and find a way out off this rock.” He puts a hand on my arm, just as cognizant of those Sons watching as I am. “Please. Get moving.” He heads off down the hall with the rest of the Howlers, leaving me alone with Holiday. I turn to her.

  “Holiday, you know Legion procedures. Get to the datacenter. Give the Sons the tactical support they need.” She looks back down the hall to where Sevro has turned a corner. “You good with that?” I ask.

  “Yes, sir. Where you going?”

  I tighten my gloves. “To get answers.”

  —

  “Virginia told us you were a Red after she left you. That is why we did not come to your Triumph,” Kavax says up to me. He’s bound to a steel pipe, legs splayed out on the floor. Still in his armor, red-gold beard dark in the low light. He cuts a menacing figure, but I’m surprised by the openness of his face. The lack of hatred. The clarity of excitement as his nostrils flare wide in recounting his tale to Ragnar and me. Sevro told the Sons that no one was to see Kavax. But apparently they don’t think the rules much apply to the Reaper. Good on that. I don’t yet have a plan, but I know Sevro’s isn’t working. I don’t have time to navigate his feelings or struggle with him. The pieces are in motion, and I need information.

  “She did not know yet what to do and so took our counsel as she did as a girl,” Kavax continues. “We were on my ship, the Reynard, having roast mutton in ponzu sauce with Sophocles, though he did not like the sauce, when Agea Command called, saying the Sovereign’s loyalist forces had attacked the Triumph in Agea. Virginia could not contact you or her father, and so feared a coup and sent Daxo and me from orbit with our knights.

  “She stayed in orbit with the ships and finally contacted Roque when Daxo and I were already descending through atmosphere. Roque said the Sovereign had attacked the Triumph and wounded you and her father gravely. He urged her to come to one of his new ships, where he was taking you because the surface was no longer safe.” I remember Roque talking on the shuttle as the Jackal leaned over me, not being able to hear him. We landed on a ship. The Sovereign was there. She never left Mars. She was hiding in Roque’s fleet. Right under my nose. “But Virginia did not rush to your bedside.” He grins jovially. “A fool in love would do so. But Virginia is clever. She saw through Roque’s mendacity. She knew the Sovereign would not simply attack the Triumph. It would be a plan within a plan. So she sent word to Orion and House Arcos that a coup was under way. That Roque was a conspirator. So when the assassins struck, attempting to kill Orion and the loyal commanders on their bridge, they were ready. There were firefights on bridges. In staterooms. Orion was badly shot in the arm, but she survived and then Roque’s ships opened fire on ours and the fleet fractured….”

  All this while Sevro and Ragnar were discovering that Fitchner was dead and the Sons of Ares base had been destroyed. And I lay paralyzed on the floor of Aja’s shuttle as everything came apart. No. Not everything.

  “She saved the crew’s lives,” I say.

  “Yes,” Kavax says. “Your crew is alive. The one you liberated with Sevro. Even many of your Legion, who we organized and managed to evacuate from Mars before the Jackal and Sovereign’s forces took power.”

  “Where are my friends imprisoned?” I ask. “On Ganymede? Io?”

  “Imprisoned?” Kavax squints at me, then bursts into laughter. “No, lad. No. Not a man or woman has left their station. The Pax is just as you left it. Orion commands, the rest follow.”

  “I don’t understand. She’s letting a Blue command?”

  “Do you think Virginia would have let you live in that tunnel when you and Ragnar were on your knees if she did not believe in your new world?” I shake my head numbly, not knowing the answer. “She would have killed you on the spot if she thought you were her enemy. But when she sat before my hearth as a girl beside Pax and my children, what stories did I read them? Did I read them myths of the Greeks? Of strong men gaining glory for their own heads? No. I told them tales of Arthur, of the Nazarene, of Vishnu. Strong heroes who wished only to protect the weak.”

  And Mustang has. More than that. She’s proven Eo right. And it wasn’t because of me. It wasn’t because of love. It was because it was the right thing to, and because mighty Kavax was more a father to her than her own ever was. I feel the tears in my eyes.

  “You were right, Darrow,” Ragnar says. His hand falls on my shoulder. “The tide rises.”

  “Then why are you here today, Kavax?”

  “Because we are losing,” he says. “The Moon Lords will not last two months. Virginia knows what is happening on Mars. The extermination. The savagery of her brother. The Sons are too weak to fight everywhere.” His large eyes show the pain of a man watching his home burn. Mars is as much their heritage as it is mine. “The cost of war is too great for a certain defeat. So when Quicksilver proposed a peace, we listened.”

  “And what are the terms?” I ask.

  “Virginia and all her allies would be pardoned by the Sovereign. She would become ArchGovernor of Mars and Adrius and his faction would be imprisoned for life. And certain reforms would be made.”

  “But the hierarchy would remain.”

  “Yes.”

  “If this is true, we must speak with her,” Ragnar says eagerly.

  “It could be a trap,” I say, watching Kavax, knowing the mind at work behind his bluff face. I want to trust him. I want to believe his sense of justice is equal to my love for him, but these are deep waters, and I know friends can lie just as well as enemies. If Mustang isn’t on my side, then this would be the play to make. It would expose me, and there’s no doubt in my mind that however she got on this station, she’s got a nasty escort.

  “One thing doesn’t make sense, Kavax. If this is true, why didn’t you make contact with Sevro?”

  Kavax blinks up at me.

  “We did. Months ago. Didn’t he tell you?”

  —

  The Howlers are packing up by the time Ragnar and I rejoin them in the ready room. “It’s all shit,” Sevro’s saying as Victra patches a gash on his back with resFlesh. Acrid smoke hisses up from the cauterizing wound. He throws down his datapad. It skitters into a corner, where Screwface collects it and brings it back to Sevro. “They’ve grounded everything, including utility flights.”

  “It’s all right, boss, we’ll find a way out,” Clown say
s.

  I entered the room quietly, nodding to Sevro that I’d like a word. He ignored me. His plan’s a mess. We were due to stow ourselves away inside one of the empty helium haulers going back to Mars. We would have been gone before anyone even knew Quicksilver was kidnapped, and then detonated the bombs off-station. Now, like Sevro says, it’s all shit.

  “We obviously can’t stay here,” Victra says, putting the resFlesh applicator down. “We left enough DNA evidence for a hundred crime scenes back there. And our faces are everywhere. Adrius will send a whole legion for us when they find out we’re here.”

  “Or blow Phobos out of the sky,” Holiday mutters. She sits on a crate of medical supplies in the corner, studying maps with Clown on her datapad. Pebble watches them from her place on the table. Her leg’s compressed with a gelCast, but the bone’s not set. We’ll need a Yellow and a full infirmary to fix what Mustang broke with a single shot. Pebble’s lucky she was wearing scarabSkin. It minimized the burn damage. Still, she’s in pain. Pupils large on a high dose of narcotics. It’s let her inhibitions loose, and I note how obviously the pudgy-faced Gold is watching Clown lean across Holiday to point at the map.

  “Helium-3 is Adrius’s lifeblood,” Victra says. “He won’t risk this station.”

  “Sevro…” I say. “A moment.”

  “Busy right now.” He turns to Rollo. “Is there any other way off this damn rock?”

  The Red leans against the med room’s gray wall next to a glossy paper cutout of a Pink model on one of Venus’s white-sand beaches. “It’s just cargo haulers down here,” he says, silently noting how our Obsidian guises have been discarded. If it startles him how many of us are Gold, he doesn’t let on. Probably knew from the start. His eyes linger on me the longest. “But they’re all grounded. They got luxury liners and private yachts in the Needles, but you go up there, you folks are caught in a minute. Two, tops. There’s facial-recognition cameras at every tram door. Retina scanners in the advertisement holos. And even if you got onto one of their ships, you gotta get past the naval pickets. Ain’t like you can just teleport to safety.”

  “That’d be convenient,” Clown mutters.

  “We jack a shuttle and run the pickets,” Sevro says. “Done it before.”

  “They’ll shoot us down,” I say tensely. It’s pissing me off that he keeps ignoring my attempts to get him to the door.

  “Didn’t last time.”

  “Last time we had Lysander,” I remind him.

  “And now we got Quicksilver.”

  “The Jackal will sacrifice Quicksilver to kill us,” I say. “Count on it.”

  “Not if we go straight vertical burn to the surface,” Sevro says. “Sons have hidden tunnel entrances. We will fall from orbit and go straight underground.”

  “I will not do that,” Ragnar says. “It is foolhardy. And it abandons these noble men and women to slaughter.”

  “I agree with Rags,” Holiday says. She scoots away from Clown and continues looking at her datapad, monitoring police frequencies.

  “Say you get off. What happens to us?” Rollo asks. “The Jackal finds out the Reaper and Ares were here and he’ll tear this station apart piecemeal. Any Son left behind will be dead in a week. Did you think of that?” He makes a disgusted look. “I know who you are. We knew the second Ragnar walked into the hangar. But I didn’t think Howlers ran. And I didn’t think the Reaper took orders.”

  Sevro takes a step toward him. “You got another option, shitface? Or you just gonna run your mouth?”

  “Yeah, I got one,” Rollo says. “Stay. Help us take the station.”

  The Howlers laugh. “Take the station? With what army?” Clown asks.

  “His,” Rollo says, turning to me. “I don’t rightly know how you’re alive, Reaper. But…I was eating noodles by myself at midnight when the Sons leaked your Carving video onto the holoNet. Society cyber police shut down the site in two minutes. But once it was out…could find it on a million sites before I finished my bowl. They couldn’t contain that. And then the Phobos servers crashed. You know why?”

  “Securitas’s cyber division pulled the plug,” Victra says. “It’s standard protocol.”

  He shakes his head. “Servers crashed because thirty million people were trying to access the holoNet at the same time in the middle of the night. Servers couldn’t handle the traffic. Golds pulled the plug after that. So what I’m sayin’ is if you march down to the Hive and tell the lowColors there you’re alive, we can take this moon.”

  “Easy as that?” Victra asks skeptically.

  “That’s right. There’s round about twenty-five million lowColors here crawling over one another, fighting for square meters, protein packages, Syndicate smack, whatever. Reaper shows his mug, all that goes to vapor. All that fighting. All that scrappin’. They want a leader, and if the Reaper of Mars decides to come back from the dead here…you won’t have an army, you’ll have a tide at your heels. You register? This will change the war.”

  He sends chills down my spine. But Victra’s skeptical, and Sevro’s quiet. Hurt.

  “Do you know what a squad of Society Legionnaires can do to a mob of rabble?” Victra asks. “The weapons you’ve seen are geared to taking out men in armor. PulseFists. Razors. When they use coilguns or rattlers on mobs, a single man can fire a thousand rounds a minute. It sounds like paper tearing. Human body doesn’t even know that sound is supposed to be frightening. They can superheat the water in your cellular structure with microwaves. And those are just Gray anti-mob squads. What if they unleash the Obsidian? What if Golds themselves come in their armor? What if they shut off your air? Your water?”

  “What if we shut off theirs?” Rollo asks.

  I frown. “Can you do that?”

  “Give me a reason to.” He looks at Victra, and by the bite in his voice, I know he knows exactly what her last name is. “They might be soldiers, domina. Might be able to put enough metal in my body that I bleed out. But before I was nine, I could strip down a gravBoot and piece it together in under four minutes. Now I’m thirty-eight and I can murder the lot of ’em ten ways till Sunday with a screwdriver and an electrical kit. And I’m sick and tired of not seeing my family. Of being stepped on and charged for oxygen, for water, for living.” He leans forward, eyes glassy. “And there’s twenty-five million of me on the other side of that door.”

  Victra rolls her eyes at the bravado. “You’re a welder with delusions of grandeur.”

  Rollo steps forward and knocks a set of wrenches off a table. They clatter on the ground, startling Clown and Holiday, who look up from the datapad. Rollo stares up indignantly at Victra. She’s easily a foot taller than him, but he doesn’t break his gaze. “I’m an engineer. Not a welder.”

  “Enough!” Sevro snarls. “This isn’t a bloodydamn debate. Quicksilver will get us off this rock. Or I’ll start taking off his fingers. Then blow the bombs….”

  “Sevro…” Ragnar says.

  “I am Ares!” Sevro snarls. “Not you.” He shoves a finger up into Ragnar’s chest and then points at me. “And not you. Finish packing the bloodydamn gear. Now.”

  He storms from the room, leaving us in awkward silence.

  “I will not abandon these men,” Ragnar says. “They have helped us. They are our people.”

  “Ares is cracked,” Rollo says to the room. “Off his mind. You need—”

  I wheel on the small man, picking him up with one hand and pinning him against the ceiling. “Don’t you say a damn thing about him.” Rollo apologizes, and I set him back on the ground. I make sure all the Howlers are listening. “Everyone stay put. I’ll be right back.”

  —

  I catch Sevro before he enters Quicksilver’s cell in a gutted old garage that the Sons use to house generators now. Sevro and the guards turn when they hear me coming. “Don’t trust me alone with him?” he sneers. “Nice.”

  “We need to talk.”

  “Sure. After he does.” Sevro pushes open the door. Cursi
ng, I follow. The room’s a forlorn shade of rust. Machines older than some of the gear in Lykos. One rattles behind the thick Silver, coughing out the electricity that powers the lights bathing the man in a circle of light, and blinding him to anything beyond it. Quicksilver sits with his shoulders back in the metal chair in the center of the room. Arms bound behind his back. His turquoise robe is bloody and rumpled. Bulldog eyes patient and measuring. Wide forehead’s covered in a thick sheen of sweat and grease.

  “Who are you?” he hisses in irritation instead of fear. The door slams shut behind us. The man seems rather irritated with his predicament. Not disrespectful or angry, but professionally peeved at the meek measure of our hospitality and the inconvenience we’ve thrust upon him. He’s not able to distinguish our faces due to the light blaring into his eyes. “Syndicate teethmen? Moon Lord dustmakers?” When we say nothing, he swallows. “Adrius, is that you?”

  Chills creep down my spine. We say nothing. Only now, as he begins to suspect that we’re the Jackal’s men does Quicksilver seem truly afraid. If we had time, we could use that fear, but we need information fast.

  “We need off this rock,” Sevro says gruffly. “You’re gonna make that happen, boyo. Or I pull off your fingers one by one.”

  “Boyo?” Quicksilver murmurs.

  “I know you have an escape vessel, contingency—”

  “Barca, is that you?” Sevro’s caught off guard “It is you. Damn the stars, boy. You scared the shit out of me. I thought you were the gorydamn Jackal.”

  “You have ten seconds to give me something I can use, or I wear your rib cage as a corset,” Sevro says, thrown by Quicksilver’s familiarity. It’s not his best threat.

  Quicksilver shakes his head. “You need to listen to me, Mr. Barca, and listen well. This is all a misunderstanding. A vast misunderstanding. I know you may not believe it. I know you may think me mad. But you must hear me. I am on your side. I am one of you, Mr. Barca.”