“Today, I declare your rule to be at its end. Your cities are not your cities. Your vessels are not your vessels. Your planets are not your planets. They were built by us. And they belong to us, the common trust of man. Now we take them back. Never mind the darkness you spread, never mind the night you summon, we will rage against it. We will howl and fight till our last breath, not just in the mines of Mars, but on the shores of Venus, on the dunes of Io’s sulfur seas, in the glacial valleys of Pluto. We will fight in the towers of Ganymede and the ghettos of Luna and the storm-stricken oceans of Europa. And if we fall, others will take our place, because we are the tide. And we are rising.”
Then Sevro slams his fist against his chest. Once, twice, thumping it rhythmically. It is echoed by the two hundred Sons of Ares. Their fists pounding their chests. By the Howlers.
In the steel mesh of the cages men and women thump their fists into the walls till it sounds like the heartbeat rising through the bowels of this vampire moon; up through the Hives of Blues, where they sit drinking coffee and studying gravitational mathematics under the warm lights of their intellectual communes; through the Gray barracks in each precinct; among the Silvers at their trading desks; the Golds in their mansions and yachts.
Out through the black ink that separates our little bubbles of life before careening down into the halls of the Jackal’s lonely hold on Attica, where he sits in his winter throne, surrounded by a sea of bent necks. There our sound rattles in his ears. There he hears my wife’s heart beat on. And he cannot stop it as it goes down and down into the mines of Mars, playing on the screens as Reds beat on their tables and the Copper magistrates watch in swelling fear as the miners look hatefully up through the duroglass that keeps them imprisoned.
Her heart beats mutinously through the bustling oceanside promenades of the archipelagos of Venus as sailboats float proudly in the harbor and shopping bags hang in frightened hands and Golds look to their drivers, their gardeners, the men who power their cities. It beats through the tin-roofed mess halls of the wheat and soybean latfundia that cover the Great Plains of Earth, where Reds use machines to toil under the huge sun to feed mouths of people they will never meet, in places they will never be. It beats even along the spine of the empire, raging through the spiked city moon of Luna, passing by the Sovereign in her glass high refuge to thunder on down snaking electrical wires and drying clothing lines to the Lost City, where a Pink girl makes breakfast after a long night of thankless work. Where a Brown cook leans away from his stove to hear as grease spatters his apron, and a Gray watches from the window of his patrol skiff as a Violet girl smashes the front door of a Post Office and his datapad summons him back to the station for emergency riot protocols.
And it beats inside me, this terrible hope, as I know that the end has begun, and I am finally awake.
“Break the chains,” I roar.
And my people roar back.
“Ragnar,” I say into my com. “Bring it down.”
The Greens cut to a different feed as the fists thump and the cages rattle. And we see a distant shot of the Society’s military spire on Phobos. A goliath of a building with docks and vestibules for weapons. Efficient and ugly as a crab. From it, the Jackal maintains his grip on the moon. There, the Grays and Obsidians will be donning armor under pale lights, rushing through metal halls in tight lines, stocking ammunition belts, and kissing pictures of their loved ones so they can come down to the Hollows and make this heart stop beating. But they will never make it here.
Because, as fists pound even harder into cages, the lights of that military spire go black. All her power turned off by Rollo and his men with the access cards provided by Quicksilver.
We could have bombed the building, but I wanted a triumph of daring, of achievement, not destruction. We need heroes. Not another ash city.
And so, a small squadron of a dozen maintenance skiffs coasts into view. Flat, ugly fliers designed to port Reds and Oranges like Rollo to their construction work on towers. Craggy stingrays covered with barnacles. But it isn’t barnacles that cling to them now. Another camera takes a closer angle, and we can see each skiff is covered with hundreds of men. Reds and Oranges in their clunky EVA suits, almost half the Sons of Ares on Phobos. Boots against the deck, harnesses latched into exterior buckles of the ship. They carry their welding gear and have Quicksilver’s weapons patched onto their legs with magnetic tape.
Among them, two feet taller than the others, is their general, Ragnar Volarus, in armor freshly painted bone white, a red slingBlade painted on the chest and back.
As the skiffs near the Society military spire, they divide down the length of the building. Sons fire magnetic harpoons to tether the skiffs to the steel. And then they go with practiced ease along the lines, flying at implausible speeds as the little motors on their buckles pull them one by one along toward the building. It’s like watching Reds in the mines. The grace and nimbleness even in the clunky suits dazzle.
More than a thousand
welders pour onto the vast building like we did Quicksilver’s spire, but they’re not playing for stealth and they’re better in null gravity than we were. Magnetic boots clutching metal girders, they skitter across the building, melting through the viewports and entering with extreme prejudice. Dozens are ripped to shreds as Grays inside fire railguns out the glass, but they fire back and pour inward. A ripWing patrol banks in along the outside of the building and rakes two of the skiffs with chain guns. Men turn to mist.
A Son fires a rocket at the ripWing. Fire blooms and vanishes and the ship cracks in half in a gout of purple flame.
The camera follows Ragnar as he breaches a window, enters a hall, and runs full-tilt into a trio of Gold knights, one who I recognize as the cousin of Priam, the man Sevro killed in the Passage and whose mother owns the deed to Phobos. Ragnar flows through the young knight without stopping. Swinging both his razors like scissors and ululating the war cry of his people, followed by a pack of heavily armed welders and laborers. I told him I wanted the spire. I didn’t tell him how to take it. He walked off with Rollo, putting an arm around the man.
Now the worlds watch a slave become a hero.
“This moon belongs to you,” Sevro says, roaring to the roiling cage city. “Rise and take it! Rise, men of Mars. Women of Mars, rise! You bloodydamn bastards! Rise!” Men and women are pulling themselves from their homes. Donning their boots and jackets. Pushing themselves toward us so that thousands clog the air avenues, crawling over the outside of the cages.
The tide has risen. And I feel a deep terror in wondering exactly what it will wash away. “Rape and murder of innocents is punishable by death. This is war, but you are on the side of good. Remember that, you little shitheads! Protect your brothers! Protect your sisters! All residents of sections 1a-4c, you are to take the armory in level 14. Residents of sections 5c-3f are to take the water-purification center on…”
Sevro seizes control of the battle and the Howlers and Sons disperse to organize the mob. It isn’t an army but a battering ram. Many will die. And when they die, more will rise in their place. This is just one of the stack cities of Phobos. The Sons will supply them with weapons, but there won’t be nearly enough to go around. Their sword is the press of flesh. Sevro will lead them, spend them, Victra in Quicksilver’s spires will guide them, and the moon will fall to the rebellion.
But I will not be here to see it.
Phobos is in uproar. Detonations shake the moon as Holiday and I run through the halls. Golds and Silvers evacuate the Needles in their flashing luxury yachts as kilometers beneath, the Hollows swarms with packs of lowColor mobs armed with welding torches, fusion cutters, pipes, black-market scorchers, and old-fashioned slug throwers. The mobs are overwhelming the tram systems and passages to gain access to the mid-sector and Needles while the Society military garrison, caught reeling from the attack on their headquarters, rushes to stop the upward migration. The Legions have training and organization on their side. We have numbers and surprise.
Not to mention fury.
No matter how many checkpoints the Grays blockade, how many trams the Grays destroy, the lowColors will seep through the cracks because they made this place, because they have allies among the midColors, thanks to Quicksilver. They open derelict transportation tunnels, hijack cargo ships in the industrial sector, pack them full of men and women, and steer them for the luxury hangars in the Needles, or even toward the public Skyresh Interplanetary Spaceport, where cruise liners and passenger ships are being loaded with evacuees.
I’m remotely jacked into Quicksilver’s security grid, watching highColors stampede over one another. Carrying luggage and valuables and children. Martian Navy ripWings and fast-moving fighters dart through the towers, shooting down the rebel ships rising from the Hollows toward the Needles. The debris from a destroyed lowColor skif crashes through the vaulted glass and steel ceiling of a Skyresh terminal, killing civilians, and shattering any illusion I might have had that this war would be sanitary.
Ducking away from a mob of lowColors, Holiday and I arrive outside a derelict hangar in the old freight garages, which haven’t been used since before the time of Augustus. It’s quiet here. Abandoned. The old pedestrian entrance is welded shut. Radiation signs warn potential scavengers away. But the doors open for us with a deep groan when a modern retinal scanner built into the metal registers my irises, as Quicksilver said it would.
The hangar is a vast rectangle skinned with dust and cobwebs. In the center of the hangar’s deck sits a silver seventy-meter-long luxury yacht shaped like a sparrow in flight. It’s a custom-built model out of the Venusian Shipyards, ostentatious, fast, and perfect for an obscenely wealthy war refugee. Quicksilver plucked it from his fleet to help us blend in with the migrating upper class. Its rear cargo plank is down, and inside the bird is filled to capacity with black crates stamped with the Sun Industries winged heel. Inside of which are several billion credits’ worth of hi-tech weapons and equipment.