He stares past me, at the Pink who let us onto the bridge. Voice thick with the betrayal of a lover instead of that of a master. “Amathea…even you?” The young woman is not shamed by his sadness.
She pulls her shoulders back, anchoring herself to the spot. She removes the rose badge on her collar that marks her the property of the gens Fabii and drops it to the ground.
A tremor passes through my friend. “You romantic sop.” Victra laughs. I close the distance between myself and Roque. Boots tracking blood over his gray steel deck. I point to the display behind him where Mustang’s ship is dying. I can see the stars glittering through holes in her hull, but still the destroyers punish her. They’re orientated off the bow of the Pax, thirty kilometers closer than her ship.
“Tell them to stop firing!” I say, pointing my razor at him. His own is on his hip. He knows how
little it means to draw it against me. “Do it now.”
“No.”
“That’s Mustang!” I say.
“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