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“Got you, boss. Nice and easy. Just a little drama and you’re done, yeah?”
With my surviving Howlers around me, we take to the air. The ragged army pouring into the city roars in a weary wave as they see our tattered wolfcloaks soaring toward the Mound of Votum. When we reach the Mound, the Howlers set me down near the top of the sand-covered steps. Armed men swarm the plaza below, bringing the wounded to the triage stations. Titan cannons boom near the spaceport.
I cannot walk under my own power, but my Howlers cluster around me so tight it appears as if I am unwounded. Dying men call my name. I stop when I can, but soon Screwface and Rhonna haul me away to the Votum family’s reception chamber. It alone provides privacy. Under defaced Gold statues, I collapse on the stone stairs, too tired and wounded for my Howlers to dare strip off my armor. A medicus visits. I don’t know him. I threaten his life if he tries to make me sleep. Screwface threatens his balls if I die. Rhonna pats his shoulder. The medicine the man administers eases the tension in my chest. I am numb with exhaustion, but I watch through the triangular hole in the ceiling as night falls. Screams and gunshots and wailing machines leak in from the darkness.
In the early hours of the night, there is a commotion in the hall outside. Screwface goes to check on it. Rhonna sits on the steps below me, not speaking, a gun in her lap even though Howlers keep watch all around the building. Blood clots on the right side of her head. The great double doors swing inward and Harnassus and Colloway enter. Thraxa au Telemanus stomps in behind them, brown with dust and blood, her armor holed like cheesecloth. She throws a bundle of Gold standards on the floor. Dozens more legionnaires file in behind her, each hauling an armful of enemy standards, some with Gold gauntlets still gripping their poles. They pile them until the stack is even taller than Thraxa herself. She slams her heels together, raises her burned fist, and declares, “Victory.”
It is easier to find men who will volunte
er to die, than to find those who are willing to endure pain with patience.
—JULIUS CAESAR
I STARE HALF BLIND INTO a firing squad of fly-eyed cameras. Out the viewport behind me, battle stations and ships of war float beyond the upper atmosphere of Luna.
Eight billion eyes watch me.
“Citizens of the Republic, this is your Sovereign. I come to you with dire news from aboard the SRN dreadnought Echo of Ares. On Friday evening last, the third day of the Mensis Martius, I received a brief from the brave men and women of the Republic Reconnaissance Division. This brief, gleaned from our human and mechanical network of sensors, telescopes, scout ships, and informants throughout the Core, indicated that a large-scale Society military operation was under way in the orbit of Mercury. The largest in materiel and manpower since the Battle of Mars, five long years ago. I considered it in the public interest that this information be kept secret until a resolution was found.
“The darker heart of me feared it would be my part to announce the greatest military disaster in our short but storied history. I thought—and many studied minds, civilian and military alike, agreed—that the whole of the Republic Expeditionary Force would be shattered by orbital bombardment, fractured into isolated centuries, and decimated by artillery, disease, starvation, and thirst. That the Free Legions, the beating heart of this great human enterprise, which has broken the chains on Luna, Earth, and Mars, and around which we were to build future legions of liberty, would perish under an Iron Rain in the deserts and mountains of Mercury.
“Now I stand before you with that precious word on my lips. Victory. Attacked from all sides, bombarded from the sky, unsupported by warships or satellites, outnumbered by the enemy air force ten to one, the Free Legions shattered the pride of the enemy host, encircled and destroyed most of their vanguard against the walls of Heliopolis, and, in the face of overwhelming odds, survived. That is victory—resounding, but not eternal.
“Now is not the time to congratulate ourselves, or claim we are responsible for this miracle. We are responsible only for this crisis. Lured by the false promises of an enemy plenipotentiary, we allowed our resolve to weaken. We allowed ourselves to believe in the better virtues of our enemy, and that peace was possible with tyrants.
“That lie, seductive though it was, has been exposed as a cruel machination of statecraft created by the newly appointed Dictator of the Society remnant, Atalantia au Grimmus. Under her spell, we compromised with the agents of tyranny. We turned on our greatest general, the sword who broke the chains of bondage, and demanded he accept a peace he knew to be a lie.
“When he did not, we cried, Traitor! Tyrant! Warmonger! In fear of him, we recalled the Home Guard elements of the White Fleet from Mercury back to Luna. With the Echo of Ares and her battle group undergoing repairs on Phobos, this left Imperator Aquarii with barely half her fleet to fight the duplicitous Dictator. Now, her fleet, the fleet which freed all of our homes floats in ruins. Two hundred of your ships of war destroyed. Thousands of your sailors killed. Millions of your brothers and sisters marooned. Quadrillions of your wealth squandered. Not by virtue of enemy arms, but by the squabbling of your Senate.”
I gesture to the forty-five Blue captains of the Ares’s battle group and twenty-eight wrathful centurions of my husband’s Seventh Legion standing behind me. While their brothers die in the Ladon, the legion agonizes on Luna, trapped after being summoned to walk in the Triumph honoring Mercury’s liberation, of all things. A Triumph the Senate commissioned. They are not pleased with the irony. And I am not pleased Sevro would rather play avenging father than stand with them. I wave my hand at the noble soldiers.
“The Echo of Ares, her battle group, and the Seventh sail for Mercury in four days’ time. The Senate says they will sail alone. Against the Ash Armada, they will most certainly perish. But they sail nonetheless, because they do not abandon their own.
“Were it within my power, I would send the entire might of our planetary defense fleets to aid them in this venture. But it is not within my power. That power lies with your Senate. From the inception of this crisis, I have urged them to use it. To bolster this rescue fleet with ships from Earth and Luna’s Home Guard or Mars’s Ecliptic Guard. Again and again my efforts have been rebuffed by the demagogues of the Vox Populi. They refuse to act. And they are not without support from you.
“I have heard it said in these last months, in the halls of the Senate, on the streets of Hyperion, on the news channels across our Republic, that we should abandon these sons and daughters of liberty, these Free Legions. I have heard them called, in public, without shame, ‘the Lost Legions.’ Written off by you, despite the courage they have summoned, the endurance they have shown, the horrors they have suffered for you. Written off because we fear that to part with our ships will invite invasion. Because we fear to once again see Society iron over our skies. Because we fear to risk the comforts and freedoms the men and women of the Free Legions purchased for us with their blood…
“I will tell you what I fear. I fear time has diluted our dream! I fear that in our comfort, we believe liberty to be self-fulfilling!” I lean forward. “I fear that the meekness of our resolve, the bickering and backbiting on which we have so decadently glutted ourselves, will rob us of the unity of will that moved the world forward to a fairer place, where respect for justice and freedom has found a foothold for the first time in a millennium.
“We have let our union erode to tribalism. We hoard our wealth. We abandon our votes for violence. We summon tantrums instead of gritting our teeth in common purpose.” I pause and make sure this stands apart, knowing that the Syndicate Queen, wherever she is, will understand my declaration of war. “We aid our enemy. Even now terrorist organizations like the Luna-based Syndicate and its franchises eat at our foundation like termites by funneling helium-3 into the bellies of Society war machines and the ships of Ascomanni raiders.”
Reporters murmur from the shadows beneath their camera drones.
“I fear that in this disunity we will sink back into the hideous epoch from which we escaped, and that the new dark age will be crueler, more sinister, and more protracted by the malice which we have awoken in our enemies.
“I believe this truth manifest: the Free Legions are not lost.” My fist hammers my lectern. “While we abandoned them, they did not abandon us. They did not cave to despair. In the cold of our neglect, in the shadow of atomic clouds, they triumphed. Yet. Despite this victory, their time is short. They have blunted Atalantia’s blade, but not her will. Pushed back to the city of Heliopolis and its attendant lands, millions of free men and women dig in to face the onslaught of enemy armor. Their supplies run low. They are surrounded. They are outnumbered. They have risked all to protect you. Now it is your turn to risk something for them.
“I call upon you, the People of the Republic, to stand united. To beseech your senators to reject fear. To reject this torpor of self-interest. To not quiver in primal trepidation at the thought of invasion, to not let your senators hoard your wealth for themselves and hide behind your ships of war, but to summon the more wrathful angels of their spirits and send forth the might of the Republic to scourge the engines of tyranny and oppression from the Mercurian sky and rescue our Free Legions.”
I let the silence stretch to the hearts of the free, and into my own. There was a moment before this doom. One I cradle close, like the last candle on a dark day. A moment of peace, where Darrow was not yet my husband, and we sat in the sands of Earth watching Sevro and Victra swim out to see the eagle nests amongst the sea stacks. Darrow cradled Pax in his arms. They had only just met. But he loved him because he was my boy, and bit by bit he realized he was his boy, our boy that we made together.
He put his ear to Pax’s chest to listen to his heartbeat. He told me then what he felt when he declared this war within the Hives of Phobos. How he was not close enough to hear the fading beat of his father’s heart, or Eo’s. But how, in that moment, he could feel the hearts of his people beating across the darkness. How in the heartbeat of our son, he could hear them all again.
I have never equaled my husband’s spirit. For so many years, I led for guilt, for duty, seldom for love, all while fearing the coldness in my ancient blood would forever rob me of the passion to hear the pulse of the people.
But I hear it now. I hear it as free hearts beat behind me. As they beat in their bunks on the torchShips that patrol the edges of free space. As they beat in the shadowed veins of asteroid mines, in the smoky dens of hinterland trade depots, in ore caravans, deepspace waystations, in the rattling assembly lines of Phobos that make the ships which protect our liberty. I hear it in the megalopolises of Mars, the broken streets of fallen Olympia, the tempestuous wine bazaars of Thessalonica, the quiet shadow of the Agean Citadel from which my father once gripped the throat of a planet and now there towers a monument to the rebel girl he hanged and made immortal. I hear them in the jungle sprawl of Echo City. In the glittering spires of Old Tokyo. In the martial training grounds of New Sparta.
Yet I sense them fading in the assimilation camps, the overflowing prisons, the broken cities, the tenement houses filled with laborers who have lost their purpose to progress, in the chanting Vox hordes who clog the streets of Luna, and in the halls of power where senators whisper how much they charge.
