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“Sefi, bend down,” Holiday barks. “I can’t reach. Bend down.” Holiday’s found Sefi in the hangar and helps her turn down her output volume. The Obsidian queen sleeps with her new pulseFist every night, but she’s a bit behind on her understanding of telecommunication equipment.
“So, like the big girl asked, was there a reason for this little tête-à-tête?” Holiday says.
“Tradition, Holi,” Sevro says, mimicking her twang. “Reap’s a sentimental sap. He’s probably going to give a speech.”
“No speech,” I say.
My odd little family whines and catcalls. “You’re not going to admonish us to rage, rage against the dying of the light?” Sevro asks. But the joke feels strange, knowing it is what Roque would have said. My chest tightens again. I feel so much love for this band of misfits and oathbreakers. So much fear. I wish that I could protect them from this. Find some way to spare them the coming hell.
“Whatever happens, remember we’re the lucky ones,” I say. “We get to make a difference today. But you’re my family. So be brave. Protect each other. And come home.”
“You too boss,” Sevro says.
“Break the chains,” Mustang says.
“Break the chains,” my friends echo.
Sevro’s face becomes a snarl as he booms out: “Howlers go…”
“Ahhhwwwooooo.” They howl like fools, cracking up. One by one, their images flicker away, and I’m left in the solitude of my helmet. I breathe and say a silent prayer to whoever is listening. Keep them safe.
I let the helmet slither back into the neck of my armor. My Blues watch me from their displays. A small coterie of Red and Gray marines stand by the door, waiting to escort me to the hangar. The strings of so many lives from so many worlds all intersecting here, at this moment around mine. How many will fray? How many will end this day? Victra smiles at me, and it seems I’m too lucky already for this day to end in joy. She should not be here. She should be across the void at the helm of an enemy battle cruiser. Yet she’s here with us, seeking the redemption she thought she could never have.
“Once more unto the breach,” she says.
“Once more,” I reply. I address the crew. “How do you all feel?”
Awkward silence. They exchange nervous glances. Unsure of how to answer. Then a young Blue woman with a bald head bursts up from her console. “We’re ready to kill some bloodydamn Golds…sir.”
They laugh, tension broken.
“Anyone else?” Victra booms. They roar in reply. Marines as young as eighteen and as old as Lorn would be now slam their steel-heeled boots against the ground.
“Patch me through to the fleet,” I command. “Broadcast on an open frequency to Quicksilver. Make sure the Golds can hear me so they know where to find me.” Virga gives me a nod. I’m live.
“My friends, this is the Reaper.” My voice echoes over the master com in all one hundred and twelve capital ships in my fleet, in the thousands of ripWings, in the leechCraft and the engine rooms and the medbays where doctors and newly appointed nurses walk through empty beds with crisp white sheets, waiting for the flood. Thirty-eight minutes from now Quicksilver and the Sons of Ares on Mars will hear it, and they’ll boost the signal to the core. Whether we’re alive at that time will depend on my dance with Roque.
“In mine, in space, in city and sky, we have lived our lives in fear. Fear of death. Fear of pain. Today, fear only that we fail. We cannot. We stand upon the edge of darkness holding the lone torch left to man. That torch will not go out. Not while I draw breath. Not while your hearts beat in your chests. Not while our ships yet have menace in them. Let others dream. Let others sing. We chosen few are the fire of our people.” I beat my chest. “We are not Red, not Blue or Gold or Gray or Obsidian. We are humanity. We are the tide. And today we reclaim the lives that have been stolen from us. We build the future we were promised.
“Guard your hearts. Guard your friends. Follow me through this evil night, and I promise you morning waits on the other side. Until then, break the chains!” I pull my razor from my arm and let it take the shape of my slingBlade. “All ships, prepare for battle.”
Red tribal drums played in the belly of one of my ships, The Evening Tide, beat through the speakers in a martial rendition of the Forbidden Song. A steady undulation of defiance as we roll toward the Sword Armada. I’ve never seen a fleet so large. Not even when we stormed Mars. That was just two rival houses summoning allies. This is the conflict of peoples. And it is appropriately massive.
Unfortunately, Roque and I studied under the same teachers. He knows the battles of Alexander, of the Han armies, and Trafalgar. He
knows the greatest threat to an overwhelming power is miscommunication, chaos. So he does not overestimate the power of his force. He subdivides into twenty smaller mobile divisions, giving relative autonomy to each Praetor to create speed and flexibility. We face not one huge hammer, but a swarm of razors.
“It’s a nightmare,” Victra murmurs.
I thought Roque would do this, but I still curse as I see it. In any space engagement, you must decide if you’re killing enemy ships or capturing them. It seems he’s intent on boarding. So we cannot slug it out with them and hope for the best. Nor can we lure his fleet into my trap from the first. They’ll muscle through it and kill the Howlers. Everything depends on the one advantage we do have. And it’s not our ships. It is not our hundred thousand Obsidians I have packed in leechCraft. It is the fact that Roque thinks he knows me, and so his entire strategy will be predicated on how I would behave.
So I decide to overshoot his estimation of my insanity and show him how little he really understands the psychology of Reds. Today I lead the Pax on a suicide mission into the heart of his fleet. But I don’t begin the battle. Orion does, soaring forward ahead of me on Persephone’s Howl with three quarters of my fleet. They cluster in spheres, the smallest corvettes still four hundred meters long. Most are half-kilometer-long torchShips, some destroyers, and the four huge dreadnoughts. Long-range missiles slither out from the Gold ships and from our own. Miniature computer-guided countermeasures are deployed. And then Roque’s fleet flashes into motion and the black space between the two fleets erupts with flack, missiles, and long-range railgun munitions. Billions of credits’ worth of munitions spent in seconds.
Orion shrinks the distance to Roque’s fleet as Mustang and Romulus’s ships hurtle toward the southern edge—per Io’s pole—of Roque’s formation, attempting to hit the only vulnerable place on a ship, the engines. But Roque’s fleet is nimble and ten squadrons divide from the rest, orientating themselves so their bristling broadsides face the bows of the Moon Lord ships coming up from the planet’s south pole and rake them with railgun fire. A hundred thousand guns go off simultaneously.
Metal shreds metal. Ships vomit oxygen and men.
But ships are made to take a beating. Huge hulks of metal subdivided into thousands of interlocking honeycombed compartments designed to isolate breaches and prevent ships from venting with one railgun shot. From these floating castles stream thousands of tiny one-man fighter craft. They swarm in small squadrons through the no-man’s-land between our fleet and Roque’s. Some packed with miniature nukes meant for killing capital ships. Helldivers and drillboys trained night and day in sims by the Sons of Ares fly with squadrons of synced Blues. They slash into the Society’s war-hardened pilots led by ripWings striped with Gold.
