“With what? Hm?” He waits for an answer. None comes. Sevro’s speechless. “I have a private security force of thirty thousand for myself and my companies. But they’re spread from Mercury to
Pluto. I don’t own those men. They are Gray contractors. Only a fraction are owned Obsidians. I have the weapons, but I don’t have the muscle to tussle with Peerless Scarred. Are you crazy? I use soft power. Not hard power. That was your father ’s purview. Even a minor house could wipe me out in direct conflict.”
“You have the largest software company in the Solar System,” Sevro says. “That means hackers.
You have munitions plants. Military tech development. You could have spied for us on the Jackal.
Given us weapons. You could have done a thousand things.”
“May I be blunt?”
I grimace. “If ever there was a time…”
Quicksilver leans back to peer down his humped nose at Sevro. “I’ve been a Son of Ares for more
than twenty years. That requires patience. A long-eyed view. You’ve been one for less than a year. And
look what’s happened. You, Mr. Barca, are a bad investment.”
“A bad…investment?”
It sounds ridiculous coming from a man chained to a metal chair with blood dribbling down his lips. But something in Quicksilver ’s eyes sells his point. This isn’t a victim. It’s a titan of a different plane. Master of his own domain. Equal, it seems, to Fitchner ’s own breed of genius. And more vast a character, more nuanced than I would have expected. But I reserve any affection for the man. He’s survived by lying for twenty years. Everything is an act. Probably even this.
Who is the real man beneath this bulldog face?
What drives him? What does he want?
“I watched. I waited to see what you would do,” he explains to Sevro. “To see if you were cut like your father. But then they executed Darrow”—he looks up at me, still confused on that note—“or pretended to, and you acted like a boy. You began a war you couldn’t win, with insufficient infrastructure, materiel, systems of coordination, supply lines. You released propaganda in the form of Darrow’s Carving to the worlds, to the mines, hoping for…what? A glorious rise of the proletariat?” He scoffs. “I thought you understood war.
“For all his faults, your father was a visionary. He promised me something better. And what has his son given us instead? Ethnic cleansing. Nuclear war. Beheadings. Pogroms. Whole cities shredded by fractious groups of Red rebels and Gold reprisals. Disunity. In other words, chaos. And chaos, Mr.
Barca, is not what I invested in. It’s bad for business, and what’s bad for business is bad for Man.”
Sevro swallows slowly, feeling the weight of the words.
“I did what I had to,” he says, sounding so small. “What no one else would.”
“Did you?” Quicksilver leans forward nastily. “Or did you do what you wanted to do? Because your feelings were hurt? Because you wanted to lash out?”
Sevro’s eyes are glassy. His silence wounding me. I want to defend him, but he needs to hear this.
“You think I haven’t been fighting, but I have,” Quicksilver continues. “The Sovereign’s opinion of the Jackal seems to have soured of late.”
“Why?” I ask.
“I couldn’t guess before, but now I’d bet anything it’s because you escaped the Jackal’s prisons. In any case, I saw an opportunity. I brought Virginia au Augustus and the Sovereign’s representatives here to broker a peace that would give Virginia the ArchGovernorship of Mars and would remove the
Jackal from power and put him in prison for life. It’s not the end I wanted. But if what we’re seeing on the Jackal’s Mars is any indication, he is the single greatest threat to the worlds and our long-term goals.”
“And yet you helped him consolidate power in the first place,” I say.
Quicksilver sighs. “At the time, I thought him less of a threat than his father. I was wrong. And so were you. He needs to be removed.”
The Jackal’s been betrayed by two allies, then.
“But your plans for an alliance are slagged now.”
“Indeed. But I don’t mourn the opportunity lost. You’re alive, Darrow, and that means this rebellion is alive. It means Fitchner ’s dream, your wife’s dream, is not yet gone from this world.”
“Why?” Sevro asks. “Why the bloodyhell would you want war? You’re the richest man in the system. You’re not an anarchist.”
“No. I am not an anarchist, a communist, a fascist, a plutocrat, or even a demokrat, for that matter.
My boys, don’t believe what they tell you in school. Government is never the solution, but it is almost