Morning Star

  “Thank Jove.” He replies, delicately taking the glass. “Your people keep trying to give me some kind of engine solvent.” He scans his datapad warily.

  “I’ve got Holiday on security,” I say. “This isn’t a Gold party.”

  He laughs. “Thank Jove for that then as well.” Finally he takes a sip from his wine. “Venusian Atolls,” he says. “Very nice.”

  “Roque had good taste. Your father is a sight,” I say, nodding to the dance floor where the big man sways along with two Reds.

  “He’s not the only one,” Daxo replies shrewdly, following my eyes to Mustang who’s now being spun about by Sevro. The woman’s face is aglow with life, or maybe it’s the alcohol. Hair sweaty and plastered on her forehead. “She loves you, you know,” Daxo says. “She’s just afraid of losing you, so she holds you far away.” He smiles to himself. “Funny how we are, isn’t it?”

  “Daxo why aren’t you dancing?” Victra says, striding up to him. “So proper all the time. Up! Up!” She hauls him up and pushes him onto the dance floor then collapses into his chair. “My feet. Raided Antonia’s closet. Forgot she’s got pigeon feet.”

  I laugh and Clown stumbles up to us, heavily drunk.

  “Victra, Darrow. A question. Do you think Pebble is interested in that man?” he asks me, leaning against one of the tables as he chugs down another glass of wine. His teeth are already purple.

  “The tall one?” Victra asks. Pebble’s dancing with a Gray captain. “She seems to fancy him.”

  “He’s terribly handsome,” Clown says. “Good teeth too.”

  “I suppose you could always cut in,” I say.

  “Well, I wouldn’t want to seem desperate.”

  “Jove forbid,” Victra says.

  “I think I’ll cut in.”

  “I think it’s a good idea,” she says. “But you should bow first. To be polite.”

  “Oh. Then it’s settled. I’ll go right now.” He pours another glass of wine. “After another drink.”

  I take the wine from him and push him on his way. Holiday appears in the doorframe to watch Clown’s awkward interruption. He’s bowing to Pebble and sweeping back his hand dramatically. “Oh, hell. He actually did it.” Victra snorts champagne through her nose. “You should do the same with Mustang. Think she’s trying to steal my husband away. Husband. That’s a weird word.”

  “It’s a weird world.”

  “Isn’t it, though. Wife. Who’d have thought?”

  I look her up and down. “On you, it seems to fit.” I put my arm around her. “It seems to fit perfectly.” She smiles radiantly.

  “Sir,” Holiday says, coming up to us.

  “Holiday, come to have a drink?” I glance over at her, smile dying when I see the expression that marks her face. Something has happened. “What is it?”

  She motions me away from Victra.

  “It’s the Jackal,” she says quietly so as not to spoil the mood. “He’s on the com for you. Direct link.”

  “What’s the delay?” I ask.

  “Six seconds.”

  On the dance floor, Sevro’s spinning with Mustang clumsily, laughing because neither knows the dance the Reds around them perform. Her hair is dark from sweat on her temples, her eyes alight with the joy of the moment. None of them feel the sudden dread in me, in the world beyond. I don’t want them to. Not tonight.

  He sits in a simple chair in the center of my circular training room wearing a coat of white with a gold lion to either side of his high collar. The stars above his glowing hologram are cold stains of light through the duroglass dome. This room was built to train for war and so it is here that I will grant my enemy an audience. I will not let him pervert this ship where Roque lived and where my friends celebrate by seeing or being anyplace else.

  Even though he’s millions of kilometers away, I can nearly smell the pencil-shaving scent of him. Hear the vast silence with which he fills rooms as I stand before his digital image. It’s so lifelike if it did not glow I would think him here. The background behind him is blurred. He watches me enter the room. No smile on his face. No false pleasantness, but I can tell he’s amused. His silver stylus spins in his one hand. The only sign of his agitation.

  “Hello, Reaper. How are the festivities?” I try not to let my discomfort show. Of course he knows of the wedding. He has spies in our fleet. How close they are to me, I cannot tell. But I don’t let the thought spread malignantly through me. If he could reach out and hurt us here, he already would have.

  “What do you want?” I ask.

  “You called me last time. I thought I should return the favor, particularly considering the message I sent of your uncle. Did you receive it?” I say nothing. “After all, when you arrive at Mars the cannons will speak for us. We may never see each other again. Strange, isn’t that? Did you see Roque before he died?”

  “I did.”

  “And did he weep for your forgiveness?”

  “No.”

  The Jackal frowns. “I thought he would. It’s easy to fool a romantic. To think he was right there when I took his girl. You went running by in the hall screaming Tactus’s name, and he looked up in confusion. I pushed a sliver of Quinn’s skull deeper into her brain with my scalpel. I thought about letting her live with brain damage. But the thought of her drooling everywhere made me sick. You think he still would have loved her if she drooled?”

  There’s a sound at the door, out of the camera’s capture range. Mustang’s followed me from the wedding. Taking in the scene, she watches quietly. I should turn off the holo. Leave this creature to himself, but I can’t seem to part with him. The same curiosity that brought me here now anchors me to this spot.

  “Roque wasn’t perfect, but he cared about Gold. He cared about humanity. He had something he would die for. And that makes him a better man than most,” I say.

  “It’s easy to forgive the dead,” the Jackal replies. “I’d know.” A tiny spasm of humanity moves across his lips. He may never say it, but the very tone of his voice tells me he is not without regret. I know he wanted his father’s approval. But could it actually be that he misses the man? That he’s forgiven his father in death and now mourns him?

  He pulls a short gold baton up from his lap. With the press of a button, the baton extends to a scepter. One with the skull of a jackal overtop the pyramid of the Society. I had it commissioned for him more than a year ago. “I’ve not parted with your gift,” he says. He traces the head of the jackal. “All my life I’ve been given lions. Nothing of my own. What does it say about me that my greatest enemy knows me better than any friend?”

  “You the scepter, I the sword,” I say, ignoring his question. “That was the plan.” I gave it to him because I wanted him to feel loved. To feel like I was his friend. And I would have been, then. I would have helped him change like Mustang did. Like Cassius might. “Is it what you thought it would be?” I ask.

  “What?”

  “Your father’s seat.”

  He frowns, considering which tack to take. “No,” he says eventually. “No it is not what I expected.”

  “You want to be hated. Don’t you?” I ask. “That’s why you killed my uncle when you didn’t need to. It gives you purpose. That’s why you called me. To feel important. But I don’t hate you.”

  “Liar.”

  “I don’t.”

  “I killed Pax and your uncle and Lorn…”

  “I pity you.”

  He recoils. “Pity?”

  “ArchGovernor of all Mars, one of the most powerful men in all the worlds. With the might to do anything you like. And it’s not enough. Nothing has ever been enough for you, nor will it be. Adrius, you’re not trying to prove yourself to your father, to me, to Virginia, to the Sovereign. You’re trying to matter to yourself. Because you’re broken inside. Because you hate what you are. You wish you were born like Claudius. Like Virginia. You wish you were like me.”

  “Like you?” he asks with a sneer. “A filthy Red?
”

  “I’m no Red.” I show him my hands, bare of Sigils. It disgusts him.

  “Not even evolved enough to have a Color, Darrow? Just a homo sapiens playing in the realm of gods.”

  “Gods?” I shake my head. “You’re no god. You’re not even a Gold. You’re just a man who thinks a title will make him great. Just a man who wants to be more than he actually is. But all you really want is love. Isn’t that right?”

  He snorts in derision. “Love is for the weak. The only thing you and I have in common is our hunger. You think that I cannot be satisfied. That I always yearn for more. But look in the mirror and you’ll see the same man staring back at you. Tell your little Red friends what you like. But I know you lost yourself among us. You yearned to be Gold. I saw it in your eyes at the Institute. I saw that fever on Luna when I proposed that we should rule. I saw it when you rode that triumphal chariot up to the steps of the citadel. It’s that hunger that makes us forever alone.”

  And there he strikes the core of me. That abyssal fear that the darkness made my reality. The fear of being alone. Of never finding love again. But then Mustang steps out to join me. “You’re wrong, brother,” she says.

  The Jackal leans back at the sight of his sister.

  “Darrow had a wife. A family he loved. He had just a little bit and he was happy. You had everything, and you were miserable. And you always will be because you covet.” His foundation of calm begins to crumble. “That’s why you killed Father and Quinn. Why you killed Pax. But this isn’t a game, brother. This isn’t one of your mazes….”

  “Do not call me brother, whore. You are no sister of mine. Opening your legs for a mongrel. For a beast of burden. Are the Obsidians next? I bet they are all queued up already. You are a disgrace to your Color and to our House.”

  I move angrily toward his holo, but Mustang puts a hand in the center of my chest and turns back to her brother. “You think you never had love, brother. But mother loved you.”

  “If she loved me why didn’t she stay?” he asks sharply. “Why did she leave?”

  “I don’t know,” Mustang says. “But I loved you too, and you threw that away. You were my twin. We were bound for life.” There are tears in her eyes. “I defended you for years. Then I find out that it was you who had Claudius killed.” She blinks through the tears, shaking her head as she finds her resolve. “I cannot forgive that. I cannot. You had love and you lost it, brother. That is your curse.”

  I step forward till I’m even with Mustang. “Adrius, we are coming for you. We will break your ships. We will storm Mars. We will burrow through the walls of your bunker. We will find you and we will bring you to justice. And when you hang from the gallows. When the door beneath you opens, when your feet do the Devil’s Dance, then you will realize in that moment that this has all been for nothing, because there will be no one left to pull your feet.”

  The pale light of the holo vanishes as we close the connection, leaving us to the glass ceiling and stars beyond. “Are you all right?” I ask Mustang. She nods, wiping her eyes.

  “Didn’t expect to start crying like that. Sorry.”

  “To be fair, I think I cry more. But, forgiven.”

  She tries a smile. “Do you actually think we can do this, Darrow?”

  Her eyes are red, the mascara she wore for the wedding stained by the tears. Her running nose is a ruddy pink, but I’ve never seen beauty as deep as hers is now. All the rawness of life flows through her. All the cracks and fears that make her who she is worn in her eyes. So imperfect and rough that I want to hold her and love her as long as I can. And for once, she lets me.

  “We have to. You and I have a whole life ahead of us,” I say, pulling her into me. It seems impossible a woman like this could ever want to be held by me, but she puts her head on my chest as I wrap my arms around her and I remember how perfectly we fit together as we hold each other and the stars and minutes pass distantly.

  “We should return to the party,” she eventually says to me.

  “Why? I have everything I need right here.” I look down at the crown of her golden head and see the darkness of her roots. I breathe in the full scent of her. If it ends tomorrow or in eighty years, I could breathe her the rest of my life. But I want more. I need more. I tilt her slender jaw up with my hand so that she’s looking at me. I was going to say something important. Something memorable. But I’ve forgotten it in her eyes. That gulf that divided us is still there, filled with questions and recrimination and guilt, but that’s only part of love, part of being human. Everything is cracked, everything is stained except the fragile moments that hang crystalline in time and make life worth living.

  The Rubicon Beacons are a sphere of transponders, each as large as two Obsidian, floating in space one million kilometers beyond Earth’s core, encircling the innermost domain of the Sovereign. For five hundred years, no foreign fleet has passed beyond their borders. Now, two months and three weeks after news of the destruction of the invincible Sword Armada reaches the Core, eight weeks after I proclaimed that we sailed on Mars, seventeen days after the Sovereign’s declaration of martial law in all Society cities, the Red Armada approaches Luna, sailing past the Rubicon Beacons without firing a shot.

  Telemanus torchShips race ahead at the vanguard to clear mines and scan for any traps left by Society forces. They’re followed by Orion’s Obsidian-filled heavy destroyers, painted with the all-seeing eyes of the ice spirits, then by the Julii fleet with Victra’s weeping sun adorning the heavy dreadnought, the Pandora, the forces of the Reformers—the daughters-in-law of Lorn au Arcos come for justice and the gold and black ships bearing the lion of Augustus led by the battle-scarred Dejah Thoris. And finally my own vessels led by the greatest ship ever built and stolen, the indomitable white Morning Star painted with a seven-kilometer-long red scythe on her port and starboard sides. The holes we carved in her with our clawDrills are not mended all through the ship. But the armor has been replaced along the outer hull. The Pax died to give her to us. And what a prize she is. We ran out of paint on the bottom scythe, so it’s a sloppy crescent moon, the symbol of House Lune. The men think it’s a good omen. An accidental promise to Octavia au Lune that we have her marked.

  War has come to the Core.

  For three days they’ve known I was coming. We could not cover our entire approach from their sensors, but the chaos around the planet shows how unprepared they are for it. It is a civilization in turmoil. The Ash Lord has arrayed the Scepter Armada, the pride of the Core, around Luna in defensive formation. Caravans of trading vessels from the Rim clutter the Via Appia above the northern Lunar hemisphere, while backlogs of civilian vessels stagger their way back along the Via Flaminia, waiting to pass through inspection on the colossal Flaminius astroDock before their descent into Earth’s atmosphere. But as we cross the Rubicon Beacons and encroach farther into Luna space, the vessels hurl themselves into a frenzy. Many bursting from their ordered queue to race for Venus, others trying to pass the Docks entirely and burn for Earth. They flare as silver and white Society fighters and fast-moving gun frigates shred engines and hulls. Dozens of vessels die to maintain order.

  We’re outnumbered, still vastly outgunned, but initiative is on our side, and so is the fear that all civilizations have of barbarian invaders.

  The first dance of the Battle of Luna has begun.

  “Attention unidentified fleet…” A brittle Copper voice echoes through an open frequency. “This is Luna Defense Command: you are in possession of stolen property and in violation of Societal deep-space boundary regulations. Identify yourself and intentions with all haste.”

  “Fire a long range missile at the Citadel,” I say.

  “That’s a million kilometers away…,” the gunBlue says. “It’ll be shot down.”

  “He bloodywell knows that,” Sevro says. “Follow the order.”

  It took a campaign of counterintelligence not just in our transmissions to Sons cells throughout the Core, but among our sh
ips and commanders to bring us here unnoticed. The Jackal will not be in position to help the Sovereign, nor will the Classis Venetum, the 4th Fleet of Venus. Or the Classis Libertas, the 5th Fleet of the inner Belt, which the Sovereign sent to Mars to aid the Jackal. At full burn all the ships will be three weeks away at current orbit. The lie worked. The spies in my ship leaked misinformation about our plans, just as I’d hoped.

  That is the peril of a solar empire: all the power in all the worlds means nothing it if is in the wrong place.

  Twenty minutes later, my missile is shot down by orbital defense platforms.

  “New direct link incoming,” the comBlue says behind me. “It’s got Praetorian tags.”

  “Main holo,” I say.

  A Gold Praetorian with an aquiline face and gray at the temples of his short-cropped hair materializes in front of me. The image will appear on all bridges and holoscreens in the fleet. “Darrow of Lykos,” he asks in an impeccably well-bred Luna accent. “Are you in possession of imperium over this war fleet?”

  “What need have I of your traditions?” I ask.

  “Very well,” the Gold says, maintaining propriety even now. “I am ArchLegate Lucius au Sejanus of the Praetorian Guard, First Cohort.” I know of Sejanus. He’s an eerie, efficient man. “I am come with a diplomatic envoy to your coordinates,” he says dryly. “I request you stay further aggression and give my shuttle access to your flagship so we might relate the Sovereign and Senate’s intentions in…”

  “Denied,” I say.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “If any Society ship comes toward my fleet, they will be fired upon. If the Sovereign wishes to speak with me, then let her do it herself. Not through a lackey’s mouth. Tell the hag we’re here for war. Not words.”

  —

  My ship throbs with activity. Told only three days ago of our true destination, the men are filled with madcap excitement. There’s something immortal to attacking Luna. Win or lose, we’ve forever stained the legacy of Gold. And in the minds of my men, and in the chatter we pick up over the coms from the Core planets and moons, there is real fear in the air. For the first time in centuries, Gold has shown weakness. Breaking the Sword Armada has spread the rebellion faster than my speeches ever could.