“Repeat, Char.”
“Diomedes…toward Phobos.”
“Registers. Keep the fleet together.”
“But…Phobos.”
“The fleet is more important,” I say. “Win your battle. We’ll handle ours.” I’m beginning to realize we won’t, but amputations on the field are best done without consulting the patient. My father said that once. At the time, I thought it grotesque.
“Do we have Rath and Votum on sensor?” I ask my Blues.
“The Lightbringer’s mass is interfering with our instruments,” they call.
I consider, then hail Kavax to warn him of possible enemy reinforcements. No reply, so I tell my Greens to keep trying and plunge back into my battle prism. Not five minutes after Virgilus’s departure, I have to send more Lionguards to support Red Legion in the shafts leading to the sector’s shield generator. Fifteen hundred left. Then a thousand as I send five hundred more. Then only five hundred left as another Praetorian vanguard breaks through Red Legion on level forty-five.
I hold on to that last five hundred. I feel the tide turning. Our numbers are wearing down the elite vanguard. A cheer even goes up as the Lightbringer backs off from the punishment of our guns.
I don’t cheer, and that is why I often feel so alone. Holiday doesn’t cheer either. She steps closer, protective, and I grow thankful she did not let me send her away.
This is not going to be pretty.
Sure enough, as soon as the Lightbringer clears out, our instruments sing with incoming contacts. Votum and Rath ships are already plunging into the no-man’s-land. Some of those ships go dark or break apart under our cannons, but they have an easier crossing than Lune’s did. When they arrive, they park just shy of the shields and wait for them to fall.
Knowing we’re lost if those shields go down, I send my last five hundred Lionguards to reinforce the shield generator. They’re only three minutes out when the enemy breaks through the Lionguards I already sent with Virgilus.
If it is Lysander leading that group, he’s just punched me in the gut.
“Tell Kavax to retreat. The shield is about to go down. He’s exposed,” I order. It’s bewildering my thousand men didn’t stop that group. My Lionguards are some of the best Grays of Mars and they’re dying like flies against the Praetorians. A few minutes later, Lysander’s gut punch really lands when the shield goes down over the sector for good, and Votum and Rath launch their own invasion.
“Is Kavax on his way out?” I ask my Blues.
“We passed the order, Sovereign. He has not replied.”
Nausea spreads through me. I try to compartmentalize. I can’t. If Kavax is alive, he’ll look up from his battle with the Praetorians on the surface, a battle he was winning, and see the Votum and Rath hulls raining reinforcements. He’ll think, if only he had twenty more minutes, he’d have finished the guard forever. Our numbers would have swallowed their vanguard inside Phobos. We’d have won.
For Kavax, that would be something he’d smile at spending his life on. But spending his life for Lune to gain glory? I want to puke, but the enemy won’t stop hitting us long enough.
Apollonius’s ships are the first to launch men at us. Cicero’s are second. And then streaming behind them are three of Diomedes’s destroyers. Our invaders will win prestige based on the order they arrived, and on the objectives—and heads—they seize. I glance at Sophocles and feel as empty as I did the day my mother died. The fox sits behind me. He cocks his head as if to ask me why all the strangers in the room are so worried, and more important, when is Kavax coming back.
I fight back the urge to moan in despair as the Minotaur’s reinforcements fall on Kavax’s division. I think of telling Niobe I spent her husband in vain, telling my son Kavax is gone, and it makes me want to die. There’s nothing we can do to stop them from reinforcing Lune.
What would Darrow do? Fight and bleed until an opportunity to obliterate the enemy appears, and if none does—fight to the death.
It’s time to retreat.
I access the general frequency. “All legions, this is your Sovereign. The enemy has secured their landfall. Disengage. Begin a fighting withdrawal to Sectors Two and Eight. Sector One cannot be held. If you stand, you will be unsupported and cut off. We hold them at Two and Eight, we can still hold the moon. Over.”
Sophocles yowls in anxiety. Nakamura’s voice is calm, but worried. “My Sovereign. It’s time to evacuate you. Bastion One will be cut off in the retreat.”
I pay her no mind. “I have work to do.”
“My Sovereign, Votum warships have dropped clawDrills on Bastion One. I will not let your life be put in harm’s way again.”
“The Nucleus is an escape pod. We can drop it to the Hollows.”
“But if the escape shaft is blocked in the bombardment—”
“We are five hundred and thirty-one people. We can save tens of thousands of lives per minute. This is a crucial moment. The retreat must be managed or it will become a rout and we will lose the moon and all the lives on it. Evacuate the Bastion, Nakamura. Clear the Nucleus of all nonessentials. Tell me when our window is about to close. Then we drop. And someone please secure that fox.”
I crack my neck, shake out my arms, and dive into coordinating the retreat. My father would be proud. I do it logically, not humanely—sacrificing common soldiers to slow the enemy and save our uncommon ones. The cold sorting of life demands so much of my focus that it’s not until Nakamura grabs my shoulder that I realize the Nucleus’s alarms are blaring, and have been for at least a minute.
“We need to drop. Those clawDrills are almost through the outer armor.”
“Another minute.”
“I gave you twenty.”
Twenty? Really? Time has lost all meaning. I look at the pie shape of Sector One—wide on the surface, a slice where it meets the Hollows—and know I’ve done what can be done. So far, the enemy is contained within the sector. Most of our forces have escaped to the sectors adjacent Sector One—either to Sector Two or Sector Eight. I nod to Holiday to initiate the Nucleus drop sequence.
A Green calls out: “Legate Telemanus’s Drachenjäger is on the line!”
Relief floods into me. “Put him on.”
A handsome, sweat-soaked face fills the Nucleus. Raving red-rimmed eyes too close for comfort stare out. It is not Kavax. It is Apollonius au Valii-Rath.
“War, the mortal hallelujah.” He makes the sound of a man receiving a foot massage. “Lionheart. I have broken your champion. Now, I come for you.”
26
VIRGINIA
Labyrinth
I THINK OF KAVAX BREAKING in the Minotaur’s armored hands and want to scream as Holiday arranges to drop the Nucleus. Numb, I scan the displays, hoping to see evidence Victra is alive, that’s she faring well in her battle on the pole. I receive nothing but old data showing a pitched battle. RipWings swirling. Capital ships hammering one another at close range. Helios’s Dustmaker slugging it out with the Pandemonia. I won’t know what’s happened until I make it to my fallback command center in the Hollows.
An Orange drones: “All personnel, brace positions for Nucleus drop. Sever the hardlines. Hardlines detached. Drop in twenty…nineteen…”