But I’m a stubborn bastard, so maybe not.
My com crackles.“Welder twenty-three, do you register?”I holster my torch and ease back on my security line.“Welder twenty-three. Ignore your existential dread for a moment and do reply…”
“Welder twenty-three registers. What’s what, Thraxa.That rash acting up again?”
Unable to find any suits wide enough for her prodigious thighs, Thraxa’s stuck inside the base. Daily, the bellicose woman grumbles that she would have preferred the honorable suicide she intended to commit in Heliopolis to the daily monotony of shift management.
“Sun’s on its way in thirty.Be a dear and rein your squad in before you boil in your suits.”
I glance over my shoulder to the eastern curve of the trash moon. “A little early, no?”
“Archimedes’s mass is speeding up the moon’s rotation. We all know you skipped physics, but trust me on this oneor by tomorrow your prick will look like a hydra. You’re rad heavy as is.”
“We can finish the hull this shift,” I say.
“Next shift can finish. Aren’t going anywhere without helium and the reactor fixed anyway. Call it.”
With a grumble, I agree and call my crew to end shift. The welders scurry along their safety lines back to the base as I count heads. When the last is in, I pull myself down the hull, push toward the base, and ease down to the airlock.
At the rim of the airlock, I pause and do something I haven’t done in all my welding shifts. I take the time to look out over the craggy horizon. A thin scythe of sunlight carves around the trash moon. It warps the mottled surface outward with heat, inverting expansion calderas until dust and toxic gas spew. The dust and gas coalesce around a scarp of green-black plastic before stretching out behind the moon to form a tail of shimmering particles.
I have seen things a Red miner was never meant to see—unspeakable horrors, impossible beauty. Things that would make the tail of particles seem commonplace. But today I feel a little different. A little morewilling to see there’s beauty here on this stepping stone. Maybe it’s the book. Maybe it’s the radiation. Whatever it is, I feel like today I have enough strength to look the other way, past the shadowy shoulder of theArchimedesto an expanse of stars in the distance where my eyes settle on a dim, ruddy light.
Home.
Space is empty and silent but my memory is full and rich with the sounds of home. I close my eyes and hear the whisper of the godTrees, the murmur of the Thermic Sea, the beating of griffin wings, Victra shouting at Sophocles, Sevro cackling at his girls, the clink and whir of Pax fiddling around in the garage, the voice of my wife.
For a perfect moment I see the promised dawn, my return to Mars, my home. Then it is gone. The moon has turned toward the sun. The light blazes through my eyelids until it is too much even for my golden eyes to bear. It is time to go down.
2
DARROW
The Book
If Mercury was aperpetual frontal assault on the nerves, Marcher-1632 is a slow siege on the mind.
The old Sons of Ares base is a claustrophobic, spartan affair. Built inside the Marcher to give early Sons raiders a hidden harbor from which to harass Venusian slavers, the base was abandoned eleven years ago when its garrison joined my fleet in our desperate attack on Luna. Eight months ago, we limped in to find the halls cold and in vacuum. By restarting the base’s solar-powered generator we reestablished habitability. We found water stores, calories when we most needed them. But temperatures and gravity remain low, and the hostile radiation beyond the lead-lined walls makes us feel besieged. We look it. We are skinny, pale despite the sun-scars of Mercury on our faces. Nearly all of us are bald and those who can wear beards in remembrance of Ragnar.
Removed from the war, blind to the movements of friends and enemies, cut off from all communication from home, worry is our incessant refrain and routine our only salvation.
I worry over my son as I de-radiate with my crew in the flush, clutching the gravBike key Pax gave me before I left Luna as I used to clutch Eo’s wedding band in the Lykos flush. I worry for Virginia as I slump through the narrow, drill-carved halls to the mess. I worry over Sevro—lost when Luna fell to the Vox—as I slurp down the freeze-dried amino mush. The others, as bald as I am, worry to either side. About their own loves. Homes. Lost time. Lost worlds. Together, we make a sea of worryunder the dim chemical lights. We try to hide that worry from each other like it’s something dark and secret and shameful. Like all lost soldiers, my survivors are tired and quiet except when they are grotesque, flippant, or profane. Sincerity is found only in the awkward silences or the quiet moments when Aurae’s lyre fills the mess with songs of the Rim that somehow remind us of our own homes.
Not for the first time, I miss her songs. It’s not been the same since she and Cassius slipped away.
I eat quickly, clean my tray, say good night to my troops, and resist the urge to condescend with a joke to get a smile. They know I left their friends to die for my mistakes. And they know I will work them half to death again next cycle. That’s my job. If you don’t use a machine, it breaks down. Like the Sons of Ares when we phased them in to the Republic military, like this base. But if something is used too much, it breaks apart, like Orion on Mercury. Like Sevro after Venus. Leadership is a tightrope, especially when you’re losing.
Checking in at the base’s machine shop to get a progress report from Harnassus, I find the Orange Imperator hunched over parts from theArchimedes’s reactor with a gaggle of mechanics. He is a simian-shaped man with big knuckles and a drinker’s nose. His beard is more prolific than my own and shot through with gray. Spanners and auto-drivers rattle in the background as he comes to speak with me.
“Cadus.”
“Darrow. Hear the hull’s ready to go,” he says.
“Nearabout. Third shift gets the honors of finishing. Won’t take them half an hour. You’re sure the plating will still be sensor resistant? It’ll be stealth that gets us home.”
“In theory it will be. So long as we didn’t dilute the plating too much thinning it out,” he says. “We’re on track to finish right behind you.”
I brighten. “Really? That test run didn’t seem too prime—”
