The Fading Dirge beats one more time and the sea stands in silence. The morning is cold. The breeze is light. It smells of soil and armor oil and grass.
Victra murmurs. “You’re the bookish one. Was it a man who said ‘hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’？” A lancer brings her gauntlets. “It must have been—to imagine something so petty as scorn to be the utmost misery a woman could suffer. What, I wonder, would he make of a mother who has seen her husband sold like meat and her babe nailed to a tree?” She dons her gauntlets. “Perhaps: wrath, I am thee? They come for our children, Virginia.” She turns to me and cups my face with one hand. “Do not fear for me. Instead, pity them.”
I thump her chest with my fist.
Victra nods to Kavax and Holiday and flies upward toward her low-flying flagship. Thraxa and Pegasus Legion follow in her wake. I look up to Mars’s twin moons and feel a little sick. I always thought Darrow and I would face this battle together. Kavax and Holiday fall in behind me, and we fly toward my flagship.
20
VIRGINIA
Nucleus
AS VICTRA’S DREADNAUGHT, THE Pandemonia, heads toward our main fleet over the north pole, my war shuttle descends from the Dejah Thoris toward Phobos, the largest pincushion mankind has ever built.
Orbiting only six thousand kilometers from the surface of Mars, Phobos circles its primary body closer than any other moon in the system. That means it moves fast and takes only seven hours and thirty-nine minutes to complete its orbit.
It is not a big moon. Certainly not compared to the moons of the Gas Giants or Earth. It is only twenty-two kilometers in diameter, though over seven centuries, humanity has stacked on another three kilometers of cityscape in almost every direction.
Hundreds of starscrapers pierce the moon’s crust. The rich live in the needles at the tips of the buildings, with the city’s population density growing the closer one draws to the surface of the moon. The population thins again as one crawls down into the belly of the moon—the Hollows—where the sediments of Phobos’s population gather in the eerie dimness surrounding the gravity generators. Much of the population has been evacuated, but not all. Tens of millions of people take a long time to move, especially when they do not all cooperate.
As the heart of our orbital defense complex, Phobos is well guarded. New grand guns and clever pyramid-shaped fortresses loom on in its cityscape. Most are positioned to defend its precious Julii-Sun docks, which are synced in orbit around Phobos like two intercrossed bandoliers. Forests of jagged towers reach past the docks. Amidst them stand monuments to heroes of the Rising. Some are carved in stone, many in ice. Kavax catches my eyes lingering on Eo’s statue. But soon she is past, and then there is only Quicksilver’s monument to my husband.
Darrow bursts into view, towering and terrible over the north pole, glaring toward the distant sun. Though my husband is still out there somewhere in the vast expanse of space, I feel him with me. It is a consolation that if he is alive, I know he is on his way home. Maybe even looking at Mars as a distant but growing star in his viewport.
“He’ll see the energy wash of the battle if he’s near,” I say absently to Holiday. “I hope it doesn’t make him do anything stupid.”
“He won’t,” Holiday says.
I turn on her. “He’s with Bellona and Sevro. Put them together and the stupidity tends to be exponential.”
Holiday doesn’t break eye contact. I feel safe around her surety. “You will see him again. Your son will see him again. I know that man. If he made it off Mercury, he can make it home. He is hard as nails and slippery as a fish.”
I nod in gratitude and turn my gaze to the enemy. The Rim and Core Armada that has come to conquer my home is little more than stardust in the distance. Their high velocity suggests they intend to pierce our defensive shell in an attempt to deploy an Iron Rain.
So much for the conservative siege we’d once expected. At least Atalantia isn’t with them.
“A Rain,” I say with a shake of my head. “I really didn’t think the Rim had it in them. Maybe Apollonius is in command after all.”
“Helios would never cede the battle plan to a Core Gold, much less Apollonius,” Kavax says, his gaze on the Pandemonia, and his thoughts on Thraxa. Only just returned and back to the fray. “Sophocles is likelier to feed me jellybeans.”
“It’s early yet,” I say. “I suppose we will see.”
A rectangle of light forms three-fourths of the way up Bastion One to permit us access. Forty heavy assault shuttles follow mine into the pyramidal fortress.
I leave most of my Lionguards in the hangars and ride the high-security lift with Kavax and Holiday down into the belly of Bastion One. With my head down, I trudge out as soon as the doors open. Ahead, a symphony of bolts and oiled steel clunks and rasps. Interdiction slabs shift and security doors dilate open to grant us access to the military nerve center of Phobos—the Nucleus.
Petty officers scatter to the side as my cavalcade enters. The door guards announce me. “The Sovereign of the Republic!”
Five hundred officers and technicians snap to attention at their stations around the interior of the sphere that comprises the Nucleus. I plunge toward the command platform at its center. The best of the Republic’s naval aristocracy wait there for me. Most are holograms beamed in from their ships. Even at short range, the enemy’s electronic warfare degrades their avatars. A few of my Legates wait off to the side.
I step onto the command deck. “Void.”
A white-walled cathedral of silence forms around the officers. Oro, the Blue commander of Phobos, is sixty, and lean as a bloodhound. His cobalt eyes are ringed with the insomniac circles of a Dostoyevsky protagonist. “Imperator Julii is nearly in place. Phobos stands ready. OBC control is yours, my Sovereign.”
He sets a glossy black battle crown on my head. The crown gives me access to the Nucleus’s systems, and the sudden influx of information is similar in sensation to being dunked into cold water at high speed. A few breaths and I adjust to the stream.
“This is the Sovereign. I have the crown.”
Two hundred battle-station commanders confirm. With the crown I can micromanage them but not the fleet itself. I am not as good as my Imperators are at their jobs, so no need to bother. I wave my hand and Mars appears in the air. The visual of the battlefield resembles a three-dimensional representation of a cell with Mars surrounded by a dense orbital shell of neutrons and protons—her orbital battle-station complex, or OBC. They orbit in two staggered shells. Shell One at six thousand kilometers from the surface. Shell Two is at three thousand. There are minefields in the gaps between the stations along with a dazzling array of gun batteries on the surface of Mars, but the surface guns will come into play only if they launch an Iron Rain. To launch an Iron Rain, they have to get through both layers of the OBC.
Static defenses are never enough on their own, not in this epoch of warfare. Spears went through chainmail after all. The OBC may look dense on the display but if the map was to scale, the size of the gaps between the battle stations would startle an amateur’s eye. The fleet and the OBC must work in tandem.
I watch the spear that represents Victra’s flagship slide into place over the north pole. Her fleet is new and heavy and nearly a match for the Core contingent in the enemy armada on its own. The other two strike forces match the Rim ships well enough in tonnage if not speed. With the planet, Phobos, and the OBC the battle is ours to lose. Oddly, that makes me nervous.