“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.”
“A faction called Red Legion is massacring every highColor they find,” Dancer says darkly. “Old friend of ours has joined their leadership. Harmony.”
“Fitting.”
“She’s poisoned them against us. They won’t take our orders, and we’ve stopped sending them weapons. We’re losing our moral high ground.”
“The man with voice and violence controls the world,” I murmur.
“Arcos?” Theodora asks. I nod. “If only he were here.”
“I’m not sure he’d help us.”
“Lamentably, it seems as if voice doesn’t exist without violence,” the Pink says. She folds a leg over the other. “The greatest weapon a rebellion has is its spiritus. The spirit of change. That little seed that finds a hope in the mind and flourishes and spreads. But the ability to plant that idea, and even the idea itself has been taken from us. The message stolen. We are voiceless.”
When she speaks, the others listen. Not to humor her like Golds would, but as if her position was nearly equal to Dancer’s.
“None of this makes any sense,” I say. “What sparked open war? The Jackal didn’t publicize killing Fitchner. He would have wanted it quiet as he purged the Sons. What was the catalyst? And also, you say we’re voiceless. But Fitchner had a communication network that could broadcast to the mines, to anywhere. He pushed Eo’s death to the masses. Made her the face of the Rising. Did the Jackal take it out?” I look around at their concerned faces. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“You didn’t tell him already?” Sevro asks. “The hell were you doing when I was gone, picking your asses?”
“Darrow wanted to be with his family,” Dancer says sharply. He turns to me with a sigh. “Much of our digital network was destroyed during the Jackal’s purges in the month after Ares was killed and you were captured. Sevro was able to warn us before the Jackal’s men hit our base in Agea. We went to ground, saved materiel, but lost massive amounts of manpower. Thousands of Sons. Trained operators. The next three months we spent trying to find you. We hijacked a transport going to Luna, but you weren’t on it. We searched the prisons. Issued bribes. But you’d disappeared, like you never existed. And then the Jackal executed you on the steps of the citadel in Agea.”