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Then, at last, she screams.
I’ve never heard anything like it. Not when I look at her. Not when I reach the end of the tunnel with Victra and hear her pain echoing after us. It is the scream of a woman who lost everything far too long ago. Victra and I hear it, but we do not turn back.
Harmony lived on pain. She’ll get it to the end. I don’t miss the lesson.
* * *
—
The slaves have left the Red Hand soldiers dying on the ground in their quest for the surface. We find them gathered with nearly a hundred Red Hand prisoners in the center of the Common. Volga is giving orders to a group of bloody men and women, telling them to search for an exit. Six are Obsidian, the rest Red with crooked Gamma sigils branded onto their foreheads.
I thought I was numb until I see my girls have come out of hiding. Lion sits with Freckles on the far wall. The older girl is crying and holding on to Lion. Lion squirms to escape and waves to me, her pistol tight in her hand.
Some of the other girls kick downed Hand men. More women descend from the township, many those who were already dwelling here. The wives. Some of the slaves watch warily as the wives pick up rifles only to point them at other wives and push them in with the men. Some throw stones at their tormentors or pull their hair or try to brain them with rocks, shrieking with a rage beyond words.
It isn’t my place to stop them.
“Door out is shut,” Victra says.
Volga wheels from her planning to find us coming toward her. She looks like hell, but drops her pulseRifle to wrap me in a hug. She spares a nod for Victra.
“How did you—” Volga begins.
“Later,” Victra snaps. She picks a piece of metal out of her bare foot. “Harmony’s…dealt with, but she said they have a torchShip. If that’s true, we have a problem.?
?
We do have a problem. While Victra may have sealed the doors, the camp outside the mine’s entrance is evacuating in clumsy fashion. Soon we see why. Via the cameras outside the mine, we watch the highland trees shiver as something rises out of sight. Soon a shadow stretches across them as a metal ship maybe six hundred meters long rises from the sea.
The chair creaks as Victra leans back. “Well, girls, it was a nice run.”
“Lyria says she got the signal out,” Volga says.
“Scopes are clear,” Victra says. “No one listened.” She taps the instruments. “Who’d you call, anyway?” A dot appears on the scanner. Victra frowns and leans forward.
I swallow as more dots appear. “Mars,” I whisper.
TWO OF THE SNOWBALL’s javelin missiles streak toward the horizon. Thirty more missiles join them, dropped by the few ships in our ragtag fleet that possess the capability. They soar ahead in a thin line toward the monstrous six-hundred-meter torchShip and her iridescent shield that blocks our path to our girls and the last remnants of the Red Hand.
When we received Lyria’s signal after two weeks of searching, we boosted it so half the continent of Cimmeria could hear. I did not expect a reply. Pax did. By the time we reached the North Thermic, our instruments looked like paint spatter from the incoming signatures. With the two juggernauts of Mars, the Obsidians and the Republic, busy assembling Armageddon, the people of Mars woke up.
More than three hundred ships arrived—dated ripWings flown by Red militia from Acaron, sleek gunboats from patriotic Silvers of Nike and Attica, war-tested fighter ships from renegade Republic pilots, civilian cargo-haulers, fishing fliers, passenger shuttles, most weaponless, with open decks loaded to capacity with Gammas hastily assembled from mines, villages, and assimilation camps all across the north of Cimmeria. All streaking low enough to sea for their bellies to glimmer with water and salt. All come to give the Red Hand the ass-kicking they’ve been begging for. Mars was the first planet enslaved by the Golds. She became the cradle of liberty, and her children watched as the Reds who started it all were squashed by what came after. Now they shout: “Blood Red! Blood Red!” as they tear across the sea.
Only to find a fucking torchShip blocking our path.
Pax theorized it would be understaffed, with poor discipline. He was right.
No flak shield devours our missiles. Without Blue allies to neural-link to the ship or sophisticated AI to control it, the Red Hand has to go manual. Men will be sprinting through corridors, barreling down gravity slides to reach the starboard cannons. It takes them just long enough for us to draw first blood.
Our missiles detonate in a crackling line. Their shields flash and buckle under the kinetic impact. “Alpha Squadron: Stage Two,” I intone into the com. “Beta Squadron: Stage One.”
With the Snowball responsible for boosting the signal, Pax urged me to seize authority, ordering the other ships to rendezvous with us over the sea south of the distress signal. The scattermash of ship captains bickered so much as they gathered that I took command more out of frustration than ambition. My extensive vocabulary of profanity and my badass ship certainly helped establish dominance over the pack.
According to my plan, the armed ships burst upward as the torchShip opens up a wall of fire. Meanwhile the unarmored civilian ships sweep in west and east behind the shelter of the mountains, skirting the torchShip’s line of sight to make landfall near the mine to rescue the besieged.
Hold on, Volga, baby. If you’re there.
Railgun rounds whistle past the Snowball. Half a dozen of our ships become debris. Even if the Red Hand torchShip is understaffed and a hundred years old, we’re outgunned. “Alpha: Stage Three.” A kilometer out from the torchShip, we dive hard at a sixty-degree angle. Screaming tendrils of turret fire lick out at us. Pax takes us into a mind-bending corkscrew and then cracks a shot on a whim.
