Morning Star Read online

  “Sevro, did he come out the sea demon’s rectum?” I ask.

  Sevro squeals with laughter. “He did! Right out the ass. Shot like a turd—” My chair rolls to a stop. His voice cut short, followed by a thump and sliding sound. My wheelchair rolls forward again. I look back and see Ragnar pushing it innocently along. Sevro isn’t in the hallway behind us. I frown, wondering where he went, till he bursts out of a side passage.

  “You! Troll!” Sevro shouts. “I’m a terrorist warlord! Stop throwing me. You made me drop my candy!” Sevro looks at the floor of the hallway. “Wait. Where is it? Dammit, Ragnar. Where is my peanut bar? You know how many people I had to kill to get that. Six! Six!” Ragnar chews quietly above me, and though I’m probably mistaken, I think I see him smile.

  “Ragnar, have you been brushing your teeth? They look splendid.”

  “Thank you,” he preens as much as a man eight feet tall can preen past a mouthful of peanut butter bar. “The wizard removed my old ones. They pained me greatly. These are new. Are they not fine?”

  “Mickey, the wizard,” I confirm.

  “Indeed. He also taught me to read before he left Tinos.” Ragnar proves this by reading every single sign and warning we pass in the hall till we enter the hangar bay some ten minutes later. Sevro follows behind, still complaining about his lost candy. The hangar is cramped by Society standards, but is still nearly thirty meters high and sixty wide. It’s been cut into the rock by laser drills. The floor is stone, blasted black from engines. Several dilapidated shuttles sit in berths beside three shining new ripWings. Reds directed by two Oranges service the ships and stare at me as we wheel past. I feel an outsider here.

  A motley group of soldiers ambles away from a battered shuttle. Some are still in armor with their wolfcloaks hanging from their shoulders. Others are stripped down to their undersuits or go bare-chested.

  “Boss!” Pebble cries from under Clown’s arm. She’s as plump as ever, and she grins at me, hauling Clown along to move faster. His puffy hair is matted with sweat, and he leans on the shorter girl. Both their faces are bright when they approach, as if I were exactly as they remembered. Pebble shoves Clown off her shoulder to give me a hug. Clown, for his part, gives a ludicrous bow.

  “Howlers reporting for duty, Primus,” he says. “Sorry about the kerfuffle.”

  “Shit got prickly,” Pebble explains before I can speak.

  “Exceedingly prickly. Something different about you, Reaper.” Clown puts his hands on his hips. “You look…slender. Did you trim your hair? Don’t tell me. It’s the beard…terribly slimming.”

  “Kind of you to notice,” I say. “And to stay, considering everything.”

  “What, you mean you lying to us for five years?”

  “Yes, that,” I say.

  “Well…” Clown says, about to light into me. Pebble thumps his shoulder.

  “Of course we’d stay, Reaper!” she says sweetly. “This our family…”

  “But we have demands….” Clown continues, wagging a finger. “If you desire our full services. But…for now, we must be off. I fear I have shrapnel in my ass. So I beg your leave. Come, Pebble. To the surgeons.”

  “Bye, boss!” Pebble says. “Glad you’re not dead!”

  “Squad dinner at eight!” Sevro calls after them. “Don’t be late. Shrapnel in your ass is not an excuse, Clown.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  Sevro turns to me with a grin. “Sods didn’t even bat an eye when I told them you were a ruster. Came with me and Rags to fetch your family right off. Was wicked telling them what was what, though. This way.”

  As we pass the ship Pebble and Clown exited, I see up the ramp into its belly. Two young boys work inside, blasting the floors with hoses. The water runs brownish red down the ramp onto the hangar deck, flowing not into a drain, but down a narrow trough toward the edge of the hangar, where it disappears over the edge.

  “Some dads leave ships or villas for their sons. Asshat Ares left me this wretched hive of angst and peasantry.”

  “Bloodydamn,” I whisper as I realize what exactly I’m looking at.

  Beyond the hangar is an inverted forest of stalactites. It glitters in the artificial subterranean dawn. Not only from the water that dribbles along their slick gray surfaces, but from the lights of docks, barracks, and sensor arrays that give teeth to Ares’s great bastion. Supply ships flit between the multiple docks.

  “We’re in a stalactite.” I laugh in wonder. But then I look down at the horror beneath and the weight on my shoulders doubles. A hundred meters below our stalactite sprawls a refugee camp. Once it was an underground city carved into the stone of Mars. The streets are so deep between the buildings, they’re more like miniature canyons. And the city spills over the floor of the colossal cave to the far walls kilometers away, where more honeycombed homes have been built. Streets switchback up the sandstone. But over that a new roofless city has spawned. One of refugees. Muddled skin and fabrics and hair all writhing like some weird, fleshy sea. They sleep on rooftops. In the streets. On the switchback stairs. I see makeshift metal symbols for Gamma, Omicron, Upsilon. All the twelve clans that they divide my people into.

  I’m stunned by the sight. “How many are there?”

  “Shit if I know. At least twenty mines. Lykos was small compared to some of the ones near the larger H-3 deposits.”

  “Four hundred sixty-five thousand. According to the logs,” Ragnar says.

  “Only half a million?” I whisper.

  “Seems like a hell of a lot more, right?”

  I nod. “Why are they here?”

  “Had to give them shelter. Poor bastards all come from mines the Jackal has purged. Pumping achlys-9 into the vents if he even suspects a Sons presence. It’s an invisible genocide.”

  A chill passes through me. “The Liquidation Protocol. Board of Quality Control’s last measure for compromised mines. How do you keep this all a secret? Jammers?”

  “Yeah. And we’re more than two clicks underground. Pop altered the topographical maps in the Society’s database. To the Golds, this is bedrock that was depleted of helium-3 more than three hundred years ago. Clever enough, for now.”

  “And how do you feed everyone?”

  “We don’t. I mean, we try, but there haven’t been rats in Tinos for a month. People are sleeping toe to nose. We’ve started moving refugees into the stalactites. But disease is already ripping through the people. Don’t have enough meds. And I can’t risk my Sons getting sick. Without them. We don’t have teeth. We’re just a sick cow waiting to be slaughtered.”

  “And they rioted,” Ragnar says.

  “Rioted?”

  “Yeah, almost forgot about that. Had to cut rations by half. They were already so small. Those ungrateful shitheads down there didn’t like that much.”

  “Many lost their lives before I descended.”

  “The Shield of Tinos,” Sevro says. “He’s more popular than I am, that’s for damn sure. They don’t blame him for shit rations. But I’m more popular than Dancer, because I have a badass helmet and he’s in charge of the nitty-gritty shit I can’t do. People are so stupid. Man breaks his back for them and they think he’s a dull-wit pennypincher. Least the Sons love him—and your uncle.”

  “It’s like we’ve fallen back a thousand years,” I say hopelessly.

  “Pretty much, except for the generators. There’s a river that runs underneath the stone. So there’s water, sanitation, power, sometimes. And…there’s lecherous shit too. Crime. Murders. Rapes. Theft. We have to keep the Gammas slags separate from everyone else. Some Omicrons hanged this little Gamma kid last week and carved the Gold Sigil into his chest, ripped the Red Sigils out of his arms. They said he was a loyalist, a goldy. He was fourteen.”

  I feel sick. “We keep the lights bright. Even at night.”

  “Yeah. Turn them off, it gets…otherworldy downstairs.” Sevro looks tired as he stares down at the city. My friend knows how to fight, but this is anoth
er battle entirely.

  I stare down at the city, unable to find the words I need to say. I feel like a prisoner who spent his whole life digging through the wall, only to break through and find he’s dug into another cell. Except there will always be another cell. And another. And another. These people are not living. They’re all just trying to postpone the end.

  “This is not what Eo wanted,” I say.

  “Yeah…well.” Sevro shrugs. “Dreaming’s easy. War isn’t.” He chews on his lip thoughtfully. “You see Cassius at all?”

  “Twice, at the end. Why?”

  “Oh, nothing.” He turns to me, eyes glittering. “It’s just that he’s the one who put Pops down.”

  “Our Society is at war…” Dancer tells me in the Sons of Ares command room. The facility is domed, skinned in rock and illuminated by pale bluish lights above, and a corona of computer terminals that glow around a central holographic display. He stands to the side of the display drenched in the blue light of Mars’s Thermic Sea. With us is Ragnar, several older Sons I don’t recognize, and Theodora, who greeted me with the graceful kiss on the lips popular in Luna’s highColor circles. Elegant even in black utility pants, she has an air of authority in the room. Like my Howlers, she was not invited by Augustus to the garden after the Triumph. Not important enough, thank Jove. Sevro sent Pebble to get her out of the Citadel as soon as it all went down. She’s been with the Sons ever since, helping Dancer’s propaganda and intelligence wings.

  “…Not just the Rising against Gold forces here and our other cells across the System. But among Gold itself. After they killed Arcos and Augustus, as well as their staunchest supporters at your Triumph, Roque and the Jackal made a coordinated play to seize the navy in orbit. They feared Virginia or the Telemanuses would rally the ships of the Golds murdered in the garden. Virginia did, not just with her father’s own ships, but with those of Arcos, under the command of three of his daughters-in-law. It came to battle around Deimos. And Roque’s fleet, even outnumbered, crushed Mustang’s and sent them into flight.”

  “She’s alive, then,” I say, knowing they’re wary of how I’d react to knowing the information.

  “Yeah,” Sevro says, watching me carefully, as do the rest. “Far as we know, she’s alive.” Ragnar seems about to say something, but Sevro cuts him off. “Dancer, show him Jupiter.”

  My eyes linger on Ragnar as Dancer waves his hand and the holographic display warps to show the great marbled gas giant of Jupiter. Surrounding it are the sixty-three smaller asteroidlike satellites and the four great moons of Jupiter—Europa, Io, Ganymede, and Calisto.

  “The purge instituted by the Jackal and Sovereign was an impressive operation that spanned not just the thirty assassinations of the garden, but over three hundred other assassinations across the Solar System. Most carried out by Olympic Knights or Praetorians. It was proposed and designed by the Jackal to eliminate the Sovereign’s key enemies on Mars, but also Luna and throughout the Society. It worked well, very well. But one grand mistake was made. In the garden, they killed Revus au Raa and his nine-year-old granddaughter.”

  “The ArchGovernor of Io,” I say. “Sending a message to the Moon Lords?”

  “Yes, but it backfired. A week after the Triumph, the children of the Moon Lords whom the Sovereign keeps on Luna as wards to ransom their parents’ loyalty escaped. Two days after that, the heirs of Raa stole the entirety of Classis Saturnus. The whole Eighth fleet garrison in its dock at Calisto with the help of the Cordovans of Ganymede.

  “The Raas declared Io’s independence for the Moons of Jupiter, their new alliance with Virginia au Augustus and the heirs of Arcos, and their war on the Sovereign.”

  “A Second Moon Rebellion. Sixty years after the burning of Rhea,” I say with a slow smile, thinking of Mustang at the head of an entire planetary system. Even if she left me, even if there’s that hollowness in the pit of my stomach when I think of her, this is good news for us. We’re not the Sovereign’s sole enemy. “Did Uranus and Saturn join? Neptune surely did.”

  “All did.”

  “All? Then there’s hope….” I say.

  “Yeah, you’d think. Right?” Sevro mutters.

  Dancer explains. “The Moon Lords also made a mistake. They expected the Sovereign would find herself mired on Mars and would be plagued with lowColor insurrection in the Core. So they assumed she would not be able to send a fleet of sufficient size six hundred million kilometers to quash their rebellion for at least three years.”

  “And they were dead wrong,” Sevro mutters. “The idiots. Got caught with their panties down.”

  “How long did it take for her to send a fleet?” I ask. “Six months?”

  “Sixty-three days.”

  “That’s impossible, the logistics on fuel alone…” My voice trails away as I remember the Ash Lord was on the way to reinforce House Bellona in orbit around Mars before we took the planet. He was weeks away then. He must have continued out to the Rim, following Mustang the entire way.

  “You should know better than anyone the efficiency of the Society Navy. They’re a war machine,” Dancer says. “Logistics and systems of operation are perfect. The longer the Rim had to prepare, the harder it would have been for the Sovereign to wage a campaign. The Sovereign knew that. So the whole Sword Armada deployed straightaway to Jupiter orbit, and they’ve been there for nearly ten months.”

  “Roque did a nasty,” Sevro says. “Snuck ahead of the main fleet and jacked that moonBreaker old Nero tried to steal last year.”

  “He stole a moonBreaker.”

  “Yeah. I know. He’s named it the Colossus and chosen it as his flagship. The ponce. It’s a nasty piece of hardware. Makes the Pax look tiny by comparison.”

  The holo above shows the Sovereign’s fleet coming upon Jupiter, where the moonBreaker waits to welcome them. The days and weeks and months of war speed past.

  “The scope of it…is manic,” Sevro says. “Each fleet twice again as large as the coalition you summoned to pound the Bellona…” He says more, but I’m lost watching the months of war speed past, realizing how the worlds kept turning without me.

  “Octavia wouldn’t have used the Ash Lord,” I say distantly. “If he even went past the asteroid belt, there would be no reconciliation. The Rim would never surrender. So who leads them? Aja?”

  “Roque au Buttsucking Fabii,” Sevro sneers.

  “He leads the entire fleet?” I ask in surprise.

  “I know, right? After the Siege of Mars and the Battle of Deimos, he’s a bloodydamn godchild to the Core. Regular Iron Gold pulled from annals past. Never mind you snuck in under his nose. Or he was a joke at the Institute. He’s good at three things. Whining, stabbing people in the back, and destroying fleets.”

  “They call him the Poet of Deimos,” Ragnar says. “He is undefeated in battle. Even against Mustang and her titans. He is very dangerous.”

  “Fleet warfare is not her game,” I say. Mustang can fight. But she’s always been more a political creature. She binds people together. But raw tactics? That’s Roque’s province.

  The warlord in me mourns having been kept away for so long. For having missed such a spectacle as that of the Second Moon Rebellion. Sixty-seven moons, most militarized, four with populations more than one hundred million. Fleet battles. Orbital bombardments. Asteroid hopping assault maneuvers with armies in mech suits. It would have been my playground. But the man in me knows if I hadn’t been in the box, this room would be missing people.

  I realize I’m internalizing too much. I force myself to communicate.

  “We’re running out of time. Aren’t we?”

  Dancer nods. “Last week, Roque took Calisto. Only Ganymede and Io hold strong. If the Moon Lords capitulate then that navy and the Legions with it return here to aid the Jackal against us. We will be the sole focus of the united military might of the Society, and they will eradicate us.”

  That was why Fitchner hated bombs. They bring the eyes, wake the giant.


  “So what about Mars? What about our war? Hell, what is our war?”

  “It’s a bloodydamn mess is what it is,” Sevro says. “It spilled over into open war about eight months ago. The Sons have stayed tight. Don’t know where Orion is. Dead, we reckon. The Pax and your ships are gone. And now we’ve got paramilitary armies that aren’t Sons-affiliated rising up in the north, massacring civilians and in turn getting wiped out by Legion airborne units. Then there’s mass strikes and protests in dozens of cities. The prisons are overflowing with political prisoners, so they’re relocating them to these makeshift camps where we know for a fact that they are pullin’ mass executions.”

  Dancer pulls up some of the holos, so I see blurry images of what look like large prisons in the desert and forest. They zoom in on lowColors disembarking transports at gunpoint and filing into the concrete structures. It switches to a view of rubble-strewn streets. Men with masks and Red armbands firing over the smoking remains of city trams. A Gold lands among them. The image cuts out.

  “We been hitting them hard as we can,” Sevro says. “Gotten some hardcore business done. Stole a dozen ships, two destroyers. Demolished the Thermic Command Center…”

  “And now they’re rebuilding it,” Dancer says.

  “Then we’ll destroy it again,” Sevro snaps.

  “When we can’t even hold a city?”

  “These Reds are not warriors.” Ragnar interrupts the two. “They can fly ships. Shoot guns. Lay bombs. Fight Grays. But when a Gold arrives, they melt away.”

  A deep silence follows his words. The Sons of Ares are guerilla fighters. Saboteurs. Spies. But in this war, Lorn’s words haunt me. “How do sheep kill a lion? By drowning him in blood.”

  “Every civilian death on Mars is blamed on us,” Theodora says eventually. “We kill two in a bombing of a munitions manufacturing plant, they say we killed a thousand. Every strike or demonstration, Society agents infiltrate the crowd masquerading as demonstrators to shoot at Gray officers or detonate suicide vests. Those images are dispersed to the media circus. And when the cameras are off, Grays break into homes and make sympathizers disappear. MidColors. LowColor. Doesn’t matter. They contain the dissent. In the north, like Sevro said, it’s open rebellion.”