“She chose her fate.”
“How many men did you send?” I ask coldly. “How many did you send to the Pax to bring me back here? Fifteen thousand? How many are on those destroyers?” I slide back the protective sheath over my datapad on my left forearm and summon the reactor diagnostics of the Pax. It pulses red. We’ve reversed the coolant flow to let the reactor overheat. A slight increase in the output demand and it goes thermal. “Tell them to cease fire or their lives are forfeit.”
He lifts his gentle chin. “According to my conscience I can give no such order.”
He knows what it means
“Then this is on both of us.”
His head snaps toward his comBlue. “Cyrus, tell the destroyers to take evasive action.”
“Too late,” Victra says as I raise the output on the generator. It throbs an evil crimson on my datapad, washing us with its light. And on the hologram behind Roque, the Pax begins to release gouts of blue flame. Frantically responding to their Imperator, the destroyers halt their barrage on Mustang and try to jet away, but a bright light implodes in the center of the Pax, enveloping the metal decks and crumpling the hull as energy spasms outward. The shock wave hits the destroyers and, crumpling their hulls, smashes them into one another. The Colossus shudders around us and we’re knocked through space as well, but her shielding holds. The Dejah Thoris drifts, lights dark. I can only pray that Mustang is alive. I bite the inside of my cheek to make me focus.
“Why didn’t you just use our guns,” Roque says, shaken by the loss of his men, of his destroyers, at being so outmaneuvered. “You could have crippled them….”
“I’m saving these guns,” I say.
“They won’t save you.” He turns back to me. “My fleet has yours in flight. They will decimate the remainder and return here and take the Colossus back. Then we’ll see then how well you hold a bridge.”
“Silly Poet. Haven’t you wondered where Sevro is?” Victra asks. “Don’t tell me you lost track of him in all this.” She nods to the screen where his fleet pursues the routed forces of the Moon Lords and Orion toward Jupiter. “He’s about to make his entry.”
When the battle began, the outermost of the inner four moons of Jupiter, Thebe, was in far rotation. But as the battle dragged on, her orbit brought her closer, and closer, taking her across the path of my now-retreating navy, just under twenty thousand kilometers from Io. Led by Antonia’s flagship, Roque’s fleet pursued, as they should have, to complete the destruction of my forces. What they did not anticipate was that my ships had always planned to bring them to Thebe, the proverbial dead horse.
While I negotiated with Romulus, teams of Helldivers were melting caverns into the face of barren Thebe. Now, as Roque’s battlecruisers and torchShips pass the moon, Sevro and six thousand soldiers in starShells pour out of the caverns. And out the other side of the moon pours two thousand leechCraft packed with fifty thousand Obsidians and forty thousand screaming Reds. Railguns spray. Flak deploys last minute. But my forces envelope the enemy, latching onto a their hulls like a cloud of Luna gutter mosquitos to burrow into their guts and claim the ships from the inside.
Yet even my victory carries betrayal. Romulus had Gold leechCraft of his own prepared to launch from the surface of the moon, so that he could capture ships as well to balance my gains. But I need the ships more than he. And my Reds collapsed the mouth of their tunnels at the same time Sevro launches. By the time he realizes the sabotage, my fleet will outnumber his.
“I could not lure you to an asteroid field, so I brought one to you,” I say to Roque as we watch the battle unfold.
“Well played,” Roque whispers. But we both know the plan works only because I have a hundred thousand Obsidian and he does not. At most, his entire fleet has ten thousand. Probably more like seven. Worse, how could he have known that I had so many when every other Sons of Ares attack has rested on the backs of Reds? Battles are won months before they are fought. I never had enough ships to beat him. But now my ships will continue to flee, continue to run away from his guns as my men carve his battlecruisers apart from the inside. Slowly his ships will become my ships and fire on the very vessels they’re in formation with. You can’t defend against that. He can vent the ships, but my men will have magnetic gear, breathing masks. He’ll only kill his own.
“The day is lost,” I say to the thin Imperator. But you can still save lives. Tell your fleet to stand down.”
He shakes his head.
“You’re in a corner, Poet,” Victra says. “There’s no getting out. Time to do the right thing. I know it’s been a while.”
“And destroy what’s left of my honor?” he asks quietly as a group of twenty men in starShells penetrate the rear hangar of a nearby destroyer. “I think not.”
“Honor?” Victra sneers. “What honor do you think you have? We were your friends and you gave us up. Not just to be killed. But to be put in boxes. To be electrocuted. Burned. Tortured night and day for a year.” Here in armor, it’s hard to imagine the blond warrior to have ever been a victim. But in her eyes there’s that special sadness that comes from seeing the void. From feeling cut away from the rest of humanity. Her voice is thick with emotion. “We were your friends.”
“I swore an oath to protect the Society, Victra. The same oath you both swore the day we stood before our betters and took the scar upon our faces. To protect the civilization that brought order to man. Look upon what you’ve done instead.” He eyes the Valkyrie behind us in disgust.
“You don’t live in a bedtime story, whimpering little sod,” she snaps. “You think any of them care about you? Antonia? The Jackal? The Sovereign?”
“No,” he says quietly. “I have no such illusions. But it’s not about them. It’s not about me. Not every life is meant to be warm. Sometimes the cold is our duty. Even if it pulls us from those we love.” He looks pityingly at her. “You’ll never be what Darrow wants. You have to know that.”
“You think I’m here for him?” she asks.
Roque frowns. “Then it’s revenge?”
“No,” she says angrily. “It’s more than that.”
“Who are you trying to fool?” Roque asks, jerking his head toward me. “Him or yourself?” The question catches Victra off guard.
“Roque, think of your men,” I say. “How many more have to die?”
“If you care so much for life, tell yours to stop firing,” Roque replies. “Tell them to fall in line and understand that life isn’t free. It isn’t without sacrifice. If all take what they want, how long will it be till there’s nothing left?”
It breaks me to hear him say those words.
My friend has always had his own way of things. His own tides that come in and out. It is not in his nature to hate. Nor was it in mine. Our worlds made us what we are, and all this pain we suffer is to fix the folly of those who came before, who shaped the world in their image and left us the ruin of their feast. Ships detonate in his irises. Washing his pale face with furious light.
“All this…,” he whispers, feeling the end coming. “Was she so lovely?”
“Yes. She was like you,” I say. “A dreamer.” He’s too young to look so old. Were it not for the lines on his face and the world between us, it would seem only yesterday that he crouched before me as I shivered on the floor of the Mars Castle after killing Julian and he told me that when you’re thrown in the deep, there’s only one choice. Keep swimming or drown. I should have loved him more. I would have done anything to keep him at my side and show him the love he deserves.
But life is the present and the future, not the past.