At the heart of this human sea waits a steel core: the thirty thousand legionnaires of Pegasus Legion beat their chests. Their white horsehair crest helms do not sparkle in the sun. Their chest plates are dented and battle-scarred. Their capes are ragged. But their weapons are pristine and the spheres on their chests declare the planets they have liberated. To fill his personal legions, my husband chose only his own breed. The kind of grunts who floss their teeth with the threads of enemy standards. Who can sleep on volcanic rocks and win a fight in heaven orhell.
Today Pegasus Legion is Thraxa’s, and she looks proud. She stands before them wearing a white wolfpelt. We don’t have many Obsidians left under Republic arms, but a few hundred remain in this legion, nearly all women. That says it all about this legion’s esprit de corps. It is a reflection of Darrow—nothing before the cause. They incite all, including me, to fight as hard as they will.
“Pegasus Legion! You were the tip of Darrow’s spear. He is not here. I am!” Victra says. “Today, I need wolves. Are you wolves?” They howl. “Good. The enemy is up there. They want to be down here. That’s not your problem. That’s the navy’s. So today, you will wait. You will be patient. Because when I release you, it will be to change the tide of battle. Make Darrow proud. Make Sevro proud. Make the enemy remember the Free Legions!”
They howl and she turns to me with a scandalous smirk. “So?”
“Vodka punch with a lemon twist,” I say to the question she asked me after our dinner with Kieran and the commanders the night before in the Citadel.
She scoffs. “That’s what you want to drink over Lune’s corpse? Vodka punch with a lemon twist? What are you? A Pixie trollop?”
“It’s gauche. He’d hate it.”
She grins. “Savage. Be that today, horsey. They certainly will.”
“Keep your head. They know you’re aggressive. They know you’ll want Apollonius too. I need you alive more than I need any of them dead.”
“Now you sound like Darrow,” she says.
It is a small kindness for her to comment on his humanity instead of invoking his name as a talisman for aggression. It touches me deeply. No matter what people think, Darrow cares for his soldiers, his commanders, and so do I.
Victra twists her neck to peer out at the sea of red faces. The Fading Dirge has slowed to a beat every few seconds. Even with her head shaved into the warhawk her husband used to wear to battle and her face painted red, the woman cannot hide a mother’s grief. She may be looking at the sea, but she is standing before Ulysses’s grave. Victra is daunting to behold in either peace or war. Her stature is tyrannical—tall, broad, muscular, with knives for cheekbones. Her nature matches—proud, brutal, voluble. But in her is a font of love that glows so hot it burns her from the inside out. For years I did not see that. I saw only her sharp edges. Now I love her and realize she was the sister I never wanted but always needed.
The Fading Dirge beats one more time and the sea stands in silence. The morning is cold. The breeze is light. It smells of soil and armor oil and grass.
Victra murmurs. “You’re the bookish one. Was it a man who said ‘hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’?” A lancer brings her gauntlets. “It must have been—to imagine something so petty as scorn to be the utmost misery a woman could suffer. What, I wonder, would he make of a mother who has seen her husband sold like meat and her babe nailed to a tree?” She dons her gauntlets. “Perhaps: wrath, I am thee? They come for our children, Virginia.” She turns to me and cups my face with one hand. “Do not fear for me. Instead, pity them.”
I thump her chest with my fist.
Victra nods to Kavax and Holiday and flies upward toward her low-flying flagship. Thraxa and Pegasus Legion follow in her wake. I look up to Mars’s twin moons and feel a little sick. I always thought Darrow and I would face this battle together. Kavax and Holiday fall in behind me, and we fly toward my flagship.
20
VIRGINIA
Nucleus
As Victra’s dreadnaught, thePandemonia,heads toward our main fleet over the north pole, my war shuttle descends from theDejah Thoristoward Phobos, the largest pincushion mankind has ever built.
Orbiting only six thousand kilometers from the surface of Mars, Phobos circles its primary body closer than any other moon in the system. That means it moves fast and takes only seven hours and thirty-nine minutes to complete its orbit.
It is not a big moon. Certainly not compared to the moons of the Gas Giants or Earth. It is only twenty-two kilometers in diameter, though over seven centuries, humanity has stacked on another three kilometers of cityscape in almost every direction.
Hundreds of starscrapers pierce the moon’s crust. The rich live in the needles at the tips of the buildings, with the city’s population density growing the closer one draws to the surface of the moon. The population thins again as one crawls down into the belly of the moon—the Hollows—where the sediments of Phobos’s population gather in the eerie dimness surrounding the gravity generators. Much of the population has been evacuated, but not all. Tens of millions of people take a long time to move, especially when they do not all cooperate.
As the heart of our orbital defense complex, Phobos is well guarded. New grand guns and clever pyramid-shaped fortresses loom on in its cityscape. Most are positioned to defend its precious Julii-Sun docks,which are synced in orbit around Phobos like two intercrossed bandoliers. Forests of jagged towers reach past the docks. Amidst them stand monuments to heroes of the Rising. Some are carved in stone, many in ice. Kavax catches my eyes lingering on Eo’s statue. But soon she is past, and then there is only Quicksilver’s monument to my husband.
Darrow bursts into view, towering and terrible over the north pole, glaring toward the distant sun. Though my husband is still out there somewhere in the vast expanse of space, I feel him with me. It is a consolation that if he is alive, I know he is on his way home. Maybe even looking at Mars as a distant but growing star in his viewport.
“He’ll see the energy wash of the battle if he’s near,” I say absently to Holiday. “I hope it doesn’t make him do anything stupid.”
“He won’t,” Holiday says.
I turn on her. “He’s with Bellona and Sevro. Put them together and the stupidity tends to be exponential.”
Holiday doesn’t break eye contact. I feel safe around her surety. “You will see him again. Your son will see him again. I know that man. If he made it off Mercury, he can make it home. He is hard as nails and slippery as a fish.”
I nod in gratitude and turn my gaze to the enemy. The Rim and Core Armada that has come to conquer my home is little more than stardust in the distance. Their high velocity suggests they intend to pierce our defensive shell in an attempt to deploy an Iron Rain.
