“Do Reds fish?”
“I never have.”
“There is a river through my estate on Mars. We will go, you and I, when this is done and sit by the bank and toss our lines and I will teach you how to tell a pike from a trout.”
“I’ll bring the whiskey,” I say.
He points a finger at me. “Yes! And we will be drunk together. Yes!” He disappears into the ship, throwing his arm around Thraxa and calling to his other daughters about a miracle he just witnessed. “I think he might be the luckiest of us,” I say as Mustang comes up from behind me to watch the Telemanus ship depart.
“Is it ridiculous if I ask you to be careful?” she asks.
“I promise not to do anything rash,” I reply with a wink. “I’ll have the Valkyrie with me. I doubt anyone will want to tangle with us for long.” She glances over my shoulder to where Sefi waits by my own shuttle, admiring the engines of other ships as they fly away. Mustang looks like she wants to say something, but is wrestling with how.
“You’re not invincible.” She touches the armor of my chest. “Some of us might want you around after all of this. After all, what’s the point of all this if you go and die on me? You hear?”
“I hear.”
“Do you?” She looks up at me. “I don’t want to be left alone again. So come back.” She raps her knuckles on my chest and turns to go to her ship.
“Mustang.” I chase after her and grab her arm, pulling her back toward me. Before she can say anything, I kiss her there surrounded by metal and engine roar. Not some delicate kiss, but a hungry one, where I pull her head to mine and feel the woman beneath the weight of duty. Her body presses against me. And I feel the shudder of fear that this will be the last time. Our lips part and I sink into her, rocking there, smelling her hair and gasping at the tightness in my chest. “I’ll see you soon.”
I pace my bridge like a caged wolf, his meal just beyond the bars. The kindness of me hidden again behind the Reaper’s savage face. “Virga, are the Howlers in position?” I ask. Behind and below me, the skeleton crew of Blues chatter in their sterile pit. Faces illuminated by holoscreens. Subdermal implants pulsing as they sync with the ship. The captain, Pelus, a waifish gentleman who was a former lieutenant aboard the Pax when I first took the ship, awaits my orders.
“Yes, sir,” Virga says from her station. “Forward elements of the enemy fleet will be within long-range guns in four minutes.”
The arrogant might of Gold unfolds across the black of space. An unending sea of pale white splinters. I’d give anything to be able to reach out and shatter them. My own capital ships cluster in three groups around our powerful dreadnoughts above the north pole of Io. Mustang and Romulus marshal their forces around the south. And together, eight thousand kilometers apart, we watch Roque’s fleet cross the void between Europa and Io to bring us battle.
“Enemy cruisers at ten thousand kilometers,” a Blue intones.
There is no preamble for my fleet. No benediction or rite that we perform before battle like the Golds. For all our right, we seem so pale and simple compared with them. But there’s a kinship here on my ship. One I saw in the engine rooms, in the gunnery stations, on the bridge. A dream that links us together and makes us brave.
“Give me Orion,” I say without turning.
A holo of the overweight, ornery Blue ripples into life in front of me. She’s half a hundred kilometers away in the heart of Persephone’s Howl, one of my other four dreadnoughts, sitting in a command chair synced with every ship captain in my fleet save
those of my strike force. Much of today relies upon her and the pirate fleet she’s assembled in the months since last we saw one another. She’s been raiding Core shipping lines. Drawing Blues to her cause. Enough to help the Sons staff the ships we stole from the Jackal with loyal men and women.
“Big fleet,” Orion says of our enemy, impressed. “I knew I never should have answered your call. I was rather enjoying being a pirate.”
“I can tell,” I say. “Your stateroom’s gaudy enough to a make a Silver blush.” The Pax has been her home for the last year and a half. She took over my old quarters and filled it right up with the booty of her raids. Rugs from Venus. Paintings from private Gold collections. I found a Titian jammed behind a bookcase.
“What can I say? I like pretty things.”
“Well, pull this off today, and I’ll find you a parrot for your shoulder. How about that?”
“Ah! Pelus told you I was looking for one. Good man, Pelus.” The waifish captain tilts his head genteelly behind me. “Damn hard to find parrots when you can’t dock planetside anywhere. We found a hawk, a dove, an owl. But no parrot. If you make it a red one I’ll personally shoot a hole in Antonia au Severus-Julii’s bridge.”
“Red parrot it is,” I say.
“Good. Good. I suppose now I should go be about the battle.” She laughs to herself and takes a tea from a valet on her bridge. “Just want to say, thank you, Darrow. For believing in me. For giving me this. After today, Blue will have no master. Goodspeed, boy.”
“Goodspeed, Admiral.”
She vanishes. I glance back at the central sensor projection. The tactical readout floats before the windows as a to-scale globe of the Jupiter system. Four tiny inner moons orbit Jupiter more closely than the four huge Galilean Moons. My eyes focus on Thebe, the outermost of them and closest to Io. It’s a small mass. Barely larger than Phobos. Long since mined for valuable minerals, and now the home of a military base that was blasted apart in the early days of the war.
“Sixty ticks till Howler coms go black,” Virga intones from her station as Victra enters the bridge, wearing thick golden armor painted with a Red slingBlade on the chest and back.
“The hell are you doing here?” I ask.