“And what are the terms?” I ask.
“Virginia and all her allies would be pardoned by the Sovereign. She would become ArchGovernor of Mars and Adrius and his faction would be imprisoned for life. And certain reforms would be made.”
“But the hierarchy would remain.”
“Yes.”
“If this is true, we must speak with her,” Ragnar says eagerly.
“It could be a trap,” I say, watching Kavax, knowing the mind at work behind his bluff face. I want to trust him. I want to believe his sense of justice is equal to my love for him, but these are deep waters, and I know friends can lie just as well as enemies. If Mustang isn’t on my side, then this would be the play to make. It would expose me, and there’s no doubt in my mind that however she got on this station, she’s got a nasty escort.
“One thing doesn’t make sense, Kavax. If this is true, why didn’t you make contact with Sevro?”
Kavax blinks up at me.
“We did. Months ago. Didn’t he tell you?”
—
The Howlers are packing up by the time Ragnar and I rejoin them in the ready room. “It’s all shit,” Sevro’s saying as Victra patches a gash on his back with resFlesh. Acrid smoke hisses up from the cauterizing wound. He throws down his datapad. It skitters into a corner, where Screwface collects it and brings it back to Sevro. “They’ve grounded everything, including utility flights.”
“It’s all right, boss, we’ll find a way out,” Clown says.
I entered the room quietly, nodding to Sevro that I’d like a word. He ignored me. His plan’s a mess. We were due to stow ourselves away inside one of the empty helium haulers going back to Mars. We would have been gone before anyone even knew Quicksilver was kidnapped, and then detonated the bombs off-station. Now, like Sevro says, it’s all shit.
“We obviously can’t stay here,” Victra says, putting the resFlesh applicator down. “We left enough DNA evidence for a hundred crime scenes back there. And our faces are everywhere. Adrius will send a whole legion for us when they find out we’re here.”
“Or blow Phobos out of the sky,” Holiday mutters. She sits on a crate of medical supplies in the corner, studying maps with Clown on her datapad. Pebble watches them from her place on the table. Her leg’s compressed with a gelCast, but the bone’s not set. We’ll need a Yellow and a full infirmary to fix what Mustang broke with a single shot. Pebble’s lucky she was wearing scarabSkin. It minimized the burn damage. Still, she’s in pain. Pupils large on a high dose of narcotics. It’s let her inhibitions loose, and I note how obviously the pudgy-faced Gold is watching Clown lean across Holiday to point at the map.
“Helium-3 is Adrius’s lifeblood,” Victra says. “He won’t risk this station.”
“Sevro…” I say. “A moment.”
“Busy right now.” He turns to Rollo. “Is there any other way off this damn rock?”
The Red leans against the med room’s gray wall next to a glossy paper cutout of a Pink model on one of Venus’s white-sand beaches. “It’s just cargo haulers down here,” he says, silently noting how our Obsidian guises have been discarded. If it startles him how many of us are Gold, he doesn’t let on. Probably knew from the start. His eyes linger on me the longest. “But they’re all grounded. They got luxury liners and private yachts in the Needles, but you go up there, you folks are caught in a minute. Two, tops. There’s facial-recognition cameras at every tram door. Retina scanners in the advertisement holos. And even if you got onto one of their ships, you gotta get past the naval pickets. Ain’t like you can just teleport to safety.”
“That’d be convenient,” Clown mutters.
“We jack a shuttle and run the pickets,” Sevro says. “Done it before.”
“They’ll shoot us down,” I say tensely. It’s pissing me off that he keeps ignoring my attempts to get him to the door.
“Didn’t last time.”
“Last time we had Lysander,” I remind him.
“And now we got Quicksilver.”
“The Jackal will sacrifice Quicksilver to kill us,” I say. “Count on it.”
“Not if we go straight vertical burn to the surface,” Sevro says. “Sons have hidden tunnel entrances. We will fall from orbit and go straight underground.”
“I will not do that,” Ragnar says. “It is foolhardy. And it abandons these noble men and women to slaughter.”
“I agree with Rags,” Holiday says. She scoots away from Clown and continues looking at her datapad, monitoring police frequencies.
“Say you get off. What happens to us?” Rollo asks. “The Jackal finds out the Reaper and Ares were here and he’ll tear this station apart piecemeal. Any Son left behind will be dead in a week. Did you think of that?” He makes a disgusted look. “I know who you are. We knew the second Ragnar walked into the hangar. But I didn’t think Howlers ran. And I didn’t think the Reaper took orders.”
Sevro takes a step toward him. “You got another option, shitface? Or you just gonna run your mouth?”
“Yeah, I got one,” Rollo says. “Stay. Help us take the station.”
The Howlers laugh. “Take the station? With what army?” Clown asks.
“His,” Rollo says, turning to me. “I don’t rightly know how you’re alive, Reaper. But…I was eating noodles by myself at midnight when the Sons leaked your Carving video onto the holoNet. Society cyber police shut down the site in two minutes. But once it was out…could find it on a million sites before I finished my bowl. They couldn’t contain that. And then the Phobos servers crashed. You know why?”
“Securitas’s cyber division pulled the plug,” Victra says. “It’s standard protocol.”
He shakes his head. “Servers crashed because thirty million people were trying to access the holoNet at the same time in the middle of the night. Servers couldn’t handle the traffic. Golds pulled the plug after that. So what I’m sayin’ is if you march down to the Hive and tell the lowColors there you’re alive, we can take this moon.”
“Easy as that?” Victra asks skeptically.
“That’s right. There’s round about twenty-five million lowColors here crawling over one another, fighting for square meters, protein packages, Syndicate smack, whatever. Reaper shows his mug, all that goes to vapor. All that fighting. All that scrappin’. They want a leader, and if the Reaper of Mars decides to come back from the dead here…you won’t have an army, you’ll have a tide at your heels. You register? This will change the war.”