Morning Star (Red Rising Saga 3)

To our left, twenty meters away, near the bridge’s armory, a tactical squad of Obsidian and Grays secure their heavy weapons and listen intently to their Gold commanders, preparing to defend their bridge against me.

And just to our right, at the control panel by the now open door, unseen and unnoticed by anyone else on the bridge, trembles a small Pink in a white valet’s uniform. The passcode display glows green under her hands. Her thin figure is frail against the backdrop of war. But the woman’s face is set defiantly, her finger on the door’s release button, her mouth spreading into the most delightful little smile as she shuts the door behind us.

All this in three seconds. The Gold infantry commander sees us.

Wolves, lovely as they are when they howl, kill best in silence. So I point to the left and the Obsidian surge toward the soldiers listening to the Gold. He shouts for them to turn, but Sefi is already on his men before they can lift their weapons. Dancing through them with her blades fluttering into faces and knees. Her Valkyrie smash into the rest. Only two guns go off by the time the Gold’s body slides off the end of Sefi’s razor and thumps to the floor.

Grays fire at us from the other side of the pit. Holiday and her commandos pick them off. My helmet slithers away. “Roque,” I snarl as my men continue to kill.

He’s turned now from his battle to see me. All the nobility in him, all the cold-blooded Imperator melting away, leaving him a stunned, startled man. Victra and I stalk across the bridge, Blues beneath us to every side, staring up at us in confusion and fear even as their ship is engaged in battle. Silently, Roque’s two Praetorians come at us. Both wear black and purple armor adorned with the silver quarter moon of House Lune. We pair off on the metal bridge in the hydra. Victra taking the right, me the left. My Praetorian is shorter than I. Her helmet off, hair in a tight bun, ready to proclaim the grand laurels of her family. “My name is Felicia au…” I feint a whip at her face. She brings her blade up, and Victra goes diagonal and impales her at the belly button. I finish her off with a neat decapitation.

“Bye, Felicia.” Victra spits, turning to the last Praetorian. “No substance these days. Are you of the same fiber?” The man drops his razor and goes to his knees, saying something about surrender. Victra’s about to cut his head off anyway, when she glimpses me out of the corner of her eye. Grudgingly, she accepts his surrender, kicking him in the face and hands him over to our Obsidians who secure the bridge. “You like the clawDrills?” Victra asks, pacing to Roque’s left. Hungry for the kill.

“That’s some poetic justice for you, you little backstabbing bitch.”

The Blues still watch on, unsure of what to do. The boarding party that came for us now fills our place in the corridor outside the bridge. We left the drill, but it would take them ten minutes at least to breach the door.

The com on Roque’s head buzzes with requests for orders. Squadrons he’d sent on attack runs now drift, over-exposed. Their commanders used to being guided by the invisible hand now fight blind to the overall battle. It’s the flaw in Roque’s strategy. The individual initiative now creates chaos, because the central intelligence has just gone silent.

“Roque, tell your fleet to stand down,” I demand. I’m soaked with sweat. Hamstring pulled. Hand trembling with exhaustion. I take a heavy step forward. Boot clomping on the steel. “Do it.”

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.