“They’re really long, mate. Like…you should trim them.”

“Nah. They’re good for hanging on to things.”

I squint at him, not sure if he’s joking, and carry on as best I can. “I’m just saying, you’re a lot of things, boyo. But you are not an idiot.”

He makes no sign of having heard me. “She thinks she had poison in her veins. That’s what she was talking about in the brig. Said she’d just ruin everything. So better just to cut it off.”

“She’s just scared,” Mustang says. “Especially after what just happened.”

“You mean what’s happening…” He sits against the wall and leans his head back against it. “Startin’ to feel like a prophecy. Death begets death begets death….”

“We won at Jupiter…,” I say.

“We can win every battle and still lose the war,” Sevro mutters. “The Jackal’s got something up his sleeve and Octavia’s only wounded. Scepter Armada is bigger than the Sword Armada, and they’ll pull the fleets from Venus and Mercury. We’ll be outnumbered three to one. People are gonna die. Probably most of the people we know.”

Mustang smiles. “Unless we change the paradigm.”

After Mustang details the broad strokes of her plan to us and we finish laughing, analyzing and dissecting its flaws, she leaves us to ruminate on it and departs to rejoin the rest of the fleet with the Telemanuses. We stay behind with Victra and the Howlers to interrogate Antonia and oversee ship repair.

The beautiful Antonia is a thing of the past. The damage she suffered was superficially catastrophic. Left orbital bone pulverized. Nose flattened, crushed so brutally they had to pull it out of her nasal cavity with forceps. Mouth so swollen it makes a hissing sound as air goes between her shattered front teeth. Whiplash and severe concussion. The ship doctors thought she was in a ship crash until they found the imprint of House Jupiter’s lightning crest in several places on her face.

“Marked by justice,” I say. Sevro rolls his eyes. “What? I can be funny.”

“Keep practicing.”

When I question Antonia, her left eye is a swollen black mass. The right peers out at me in rage, but she cooperates. Perhaps now because she thinks threats against her carry a bit of merit, and that her sister is just waiting to finish the job.

According to her, the Jackal’s last communiqué stated he was making preparations for our attack on Mars. He gathers his fleet around retaken Phobos and recalls Society ships from The Can and other naval depots. Similarly, there’s an exodus of Gold, Silver, and Copper ships away from Mars to Luna or Venus, which have become refugee centers for disenfranchised patricians. Like London during the first French Revolution or New Zealand after the Third World War when the continents brimmed with radioactivity.

The problem with Antonia’s information is that it’s difficult to verify. Impossible really, with long range and intra-planetary communication essentially back to the stone age. For all we know the Jackal might have prepared contingency information for her to give us in case she was captured under duress. If she uses that information and we act on it, we could easily be falling into a trap. Thistle would have been crucial to our understanding of information. Antonia’s murder of her was horrific, but tactically very efficient.

Holiday joins me on the bridge of the Pandora as I try to make that contact. I sit cross-legged on the forward observation post attempting to log in to Quicksilver’s digital dataDrop again. It’s late night ship-time. Lights dimmed. Skeleton crew of Blues manning the pit below guiding us back to the rendezvous with the main fleet. Shadowy asteroids rotate in the distance. Holiday plops down beside me.

“Fortify thyself,” she says, handing me a tin coffee mug.

“That’s nice of you,” I say in surprise. “Can’t sleep either?”

“Nah. Hate ships actually. Don’t laugh.”

“That’s gotta be inconvenient for a Legionnaire.”

“Tell me about it. Half of being a soldier is being able to sleep anywhere.”

“And the other half?”

“Being able to shit anywhere, wait, and to accept stupid orders without going manic.” She taps the deck. “It’s the engine hum. Reminds me of wasps.” She wiggles off her boots. “You mind?”

“Go on.” I sip the coffee. “This is whiskey.”

“You catch on quick.” She winks at me boyishly.

She nods to the datapad in my hands. “Still nothin’?”

“Asteroids are bad enough, but Society is jamming everything they can.”

“Well, Quicksilver gave them a run for it.”

We sit quietly together. Hers isn’t a naturally soothing presence, but it’s the easy one of a woman raised in the agriculture backcountry where your reputation’s only as good as your word and your hunting dog. We’re not alike in many ways, but there’s a chip on her shoulder I understand.

“Sorry about your friend,” she says.

“Which one?”

“Both. You know the girl long?”

“Since school. She was a bit nasty. But loyal…”

“Till she wasn’t,” she says. I shrug in reply. “Julii is rattled.”

“She talk to you?” I ask.

She laughs lightly. “Not a chance.” She pops a laced burner into her mouth and lights up, I shake my head when she offers me a drag. The ship’s air ducts hum. “Silence is a bitch, isn’t it?” she says after a while. “But I guess you’d know that after the box.”

I nod. “No one ever asks me about it,” I say. “The box.”

“No one asks me about Trigg.”

“Do you want them to?”

“Nah.”

“I never used to mind it,” I say. “The silence.”

“Well, you fill it with more things when you get older.”

“Wasn’t much to do in Lykos, ’cept sit around and watch the darkness in Lykos.”

“Watch the darkness. That’s so badass sounding.” Smoke jets out of her nose. “We grew up near corn. Bit less dramatic. Shitloads of it far as you could see. I’d go stand in the middle of it at night sometimes and pretend it was an ocean. You can hear it whispering. It’s not peaceful. Not like you’d think. It’s malevolent. I always wanted to be somewhere else. Not like Trigg. He loved Goodhope. Wanted to enlist at the local precinct for policing duty or be a game warden. He’d be happy kicking it in the backwater till he was old, drinking with those idiots at Lou’s, going hunting in early morning frost. I was the one who wanted out. Who wanted to hear the ocean, see the stars. Twenty years of service to the Legion. Cheap price.”