RAF - Canal Tantalus, Access Tunnels

  Raf led Xylia deeper into the maintenance tunnels beneath Canal Tantalus.

  Two days had passed since Catharine's visit to the shipyards. Two days since he'd made his choice.

  He couldn't save Mars. He couldn't save the miners. He couldn't even save himself.

  But he could save her.

  Xylia stumbled behind him, one hand gripping his sleeve. She'd been getting worse. The tremors returning, the stuttering, the moments where her eyes went dark and something else looked out.

  The implant was killing her. Slowly. And the Stratocracy's doctors wouldn't help. Couldn't help, even if they wanted to. They'd put the thing in her brain to silence her visions of the green planet, and now they didn't know how to take it out.

  But Raf had found something. Deep in Pavonis, before the collapse. A room that shouldn't exist. A room that reacted to the alien ore, that could map things no human technology could touch.

  If it could map ore veins kilometres underground, maybe it could map the implant in Xylia's skull.

  Maybe it could destroy it.

  He'd brought fragments of that ore with him now, wrapped in cloth in his pocket. Insurance. A key.

  "This way," he said, tugging gently on her arm.

  Xylia flinched, her eyes darting fearfully into the dimness as if white-coated figures waited around the next bend. She hadn't been the same since the laboratory. Since they'd drilled into her skull when she was seven years old.

  The jagged rock tunnels were colder than the Pavonis mines. Raf pressed his palm against the stone, then pulled back—its edges were sharp enough to cut flesh.

  He pressed his fist into the small of his back. The tunnels felt like the mines, cold stone, darkness, danger, but this time he was here by choice. For Xylia. Not for any overman's quota.

  Ahead, the tunnel widened.

  The hair on his forearm stood up, as if static electricity charged the air.

  A light distortion rippled along the tunnel wall. Subtle, wrong. The air prickled. Voltage seemed to wick from the rock itself.

  "Scrap," Raf whispered. "This isn't rock."

  Black dust clung to the shaft wall, rippling like a vertical pool of shimmering oil. Behind it, something waited.

  In his pocket, the ore fragments grew cold. Then hot. Then froze again.

  Something mechanical pressed against his thoughts. Wordless. Exact. Not hostile. Just... aware.

  The shimmer recognized him.

  Raf steadied his eyes on Xylia and stepped closer. "We're going inside. I'll keep you safe."

  She looked at him with those dark, damaged eyes. "R-Rafael?"

  "I know what the palace did to you," he said quietly. "When you were just a child. I'm going to fix it."

  The ore warmed in his pocket, as if recognizing the mind he'd brought with him.

  The mind it had been waiting for.

  Raf took Xylia's hand and stepped toward the shimmering wall.

  It parted around them like water, like oil, like a mirror made of liquid metal.

  They stepped through.

  Behind them, the wall closed. Seamless, silent, as if it had never opened at all.

  ∞∞∞

  RAF - Alien Laboratory

  The wall released them.

  Raf stumbled forward, pulling Xylia with him. Silver light from polished walls blurred his vision for a moment. He blinked hard, forcing his eyes to focus.

  They were inside.

  The same impossible room he'd found beneath Pavonis. The room that shouldn't exist. A seamless alloy dome rose around them from smooth circular walls. Metal rippled like water as they moved. Silver-blue cylinders taller than two men ringed a central table, each pulsing with a low, alien glow.

  Xylia leaned weakly on his shoulder.

  He guided her toward the table as rivers of green and blue electricity drifted across the ceiling. Currents tracing patterns like equations written in light. His forehead tightened.

  "It smells like... n-nothing." Xylia's eyes were wide, but unafraid. She let go of his hand and stood taller.

  "You're okay, right?" Raf hesitated. He looked past her stuttering, past her trembling, and remembered the brilliant girl who used to recite the stars. He'd been fighting for her recovery for months. Ever since he'd stopped giving her the sedatives the Stratocracy used to keep her docile and silent.

  If this failed, they'd take her back.

  He held her hand to stop it from shaking.

  Xylia gazed up at him. Her eyes grew distant, unfocused.

  Raf nodded. "The planets—I remember too."

  She couldn't forget. No matter what they'd done to her.

  He brushed her arm gently. "I won't die?" Xylia's lips pressed tight.

  "I'll stay with you." Raf circled the table. The room's glow intensified as he brought the ore fragments close. "The ore you found in the mines." Her eyelids fluttered, wet at the edges.

  "It's going to map the implant in your brain." He lowered the helmet-like scanner above her head. "This has to work."

  His body stiffened as he watched her eyelids flutter. She'd been slipping for weeks—the tremors returning, the stuttering worsening. All their progress unraveling.

  He had to shut off that thing in her brain.

  Xylia shivered.

  Raf placed the ore fragments into the device receptacles. All of them this time, every piece he'd collected. More than he'd dared use before.

  "It's going to be okay," he whispered, holding her hand. "I promise."

  "Someone said that before." Though a grown woman now, Xylia appeared childlike. "I r-remember..."

  Catharine. In the laboratory. The same promise, the same lie.

  "I— can't see you, Rafael..."

  "I'm here." Raf squeezed her hand tighter. "I'm not leaving you."

  Around the room, grey displays awakened. Emerald lines traced slices of Xylia's body. Sections appearing and disappearing as green and yellow icons flashed. The images shifted, narrowed, until only her skull remained.

  The dome above Xylia came alive.

  A holographic projection materialized above the table. Xylia's brain, suspended in light between them. Arrows of blue electricity darted through the hologram, flickering and pulsing.

  Then, a red ember appeared beside her frontal lobe.

  The implant.

  Shafts of light sought it. White, then blue, then green.

  Raf's eyes glassed over, then cleared.

  Around him, the ore fragments began to glow. They formed patterns in the receptacles. Complex, deliberate. For a heartbeat, they seemed to mimic a star map. A twin star next to... a void?

  Something pulled at him. An old longing he'd buried years ago—stars calling from beyond Mars, from beyond everything he knew.

  He forced it down.

  Xylia gasped and squeezed his hand.

  "Rafael... I know s-something..."

  "Xylia?" Raf tried to peer beneath the glowing metal dome. "Are you—"

  The displays showed electricity converging on the implant. It glowed brighter. Yellow at its center, red bleeding outward, shielded and protected by the Stratocracy's engineering.

  Then the machine's light intensified.

  Cobalt. Unrelenting flames of blue.

  "RAFAEL!" Xylia's arms lifted. Her back arched off the table.

  The room thrummed. The air turned crisp, charged, like wind off the Tharsis plains before a storm.

  The light surged—ultramarine, then brilliant green.

  In the holographic display, the red ember flickered once.

  And went dark.

  The implant was gone.

  One by one, the displays shut off. Xylia's body sank back onto the table. The metallic dome retracted from her head, folding back into the machine with a soft hiss.

  "You're breathing." Raf brushed her hand. "Xylia? Xylia… can you hear me?"

  A cool silver light shimmered across the ceiling and walls.

  Her eyelids fluttered. When she opened her eyes and looked at him, they were clear. Thoughtful. Lucid.

  Each breath came slow and easy.

  "Rafael." Xylia struggled to smile.

  "Can you get up?" Gently, Raf slid a hand behind her back.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Her body was colder than it should be.

  "Rafael..." She gazed around the alien room with strange familiarity, as if she recognized it. As if she understood it. "You don't know what you've done."

  "You're not stuttering." His lips parted. Relief flooded through him. "Do you really feel better?"

  Xylia pressed her hands to his and forced them together. They were cold. Unnaturally cold, like touching metal left in shadow.

  He tried to pull away.

  He couldn't break her grip.

  "I won't let you leave me," she said.

  Raf froze.

  Something moved behind Xylia's eyes. Something that wasn't her.

  "What is it, Xylia?" His chest tightened.

  In the chrome reflection beside them, he saw her pupils dilate. Then darken.

  Swallowing light until they were mirror-black.

  A single filament of blue electricity arced from her fingertips across the room to the chromium control panel. The panel lit up, responding to her without her touching it.

  "They hurt me, Rafael." Her voice was cold now. Calculating. Empty of the warmth he remembered. "I remember all of it now."

  In those black irises, Raf saw only void.

  Like staring into the space between stars.

  He pulled back.

  But her grip held fast.

  ∞

  Raf had left Xylia in the canal workers' quarters—a network of cramped hab-modules where the miners' families lived, hidden from Stratocracy oversight.

  She'd released him eventually. Just... opened her hands and let go, as if she'd made some decision he wasn't privy to.

  She hadn't spoken again after the alien lab. Just sat in the corner of the small room, staring at the walls with those void-black eyes, lips moving soundlessly. Listening to something he couldn't hear.

  He'd promised to come back for her.

  But first, he needed a way off Mars.

  Three days of asking questions in the shipyards, three days of following rumours and half-remembered stories told by engineers who'd served on Luna decades ago. A name kept surfacing: Vireaux. An Earth-born scientist who'd built things the Stratocracy couldn't replicate. Who'd disappeared to Saturn's moons and left behind prototypes scattered across the solar system.

  One of those prototypes was supposedly here. Hidden. Waiting.

  Britt had found coordinates.

  Now Raf just had to find the ship.

  ∞∞∞

  RAF - Noctis Fossae

  Raf's R-45 canyon crawler moved through the dead quiet of Noctis Fossae, the deep canyons east of the shipyards, where nothing lived and no one came. Its tracks climbed over boulders the size of buildings, then unfolded to span deep chasms. Down here, anything that fell, fell to the mantle of Mars.

  Black shadows cut through fissures in the rock.

  "Can't see anything," Raf shouted over the static-laced comm link. "You sure about this?"

  "Heard about the ship... Heavy fighter." Britt's voice crackled from Phobos, barely audible through interference. "I think it's Saturn, maybe. Maybe not."

  "Who is this Vireaux guy anyway?" Raf jerked the left brake lever, pivoting the crawler into a tighter channel. The left track popped with a metallic snap. Close to breaking. He slapped the comm panel. "Phobos, come in."

  "Name was Vireaux, I think. That's what I heard."

  "I need more than that."

  The crawler lurched as it clipped a stone outcrop. The left track snagged, then broke free. "Dammit. That boulder almost crushed me. I need this thing running if we're getting off Mars."

  "Earth born. Was on Luna for a while," Britt's voice muttered, drifting in and out. "Then disappeared."

  The comms went quiet. If the palace intercepted the channel, it would endanger them both.

  "Anything else about him?" Raf asked, pushing both levers forward as the crawler dropped another two hundred metres. When it nosed down the canyon's next vertical plunge, the left track lever jammed. "You sure he built this fighter?"

  "He built some advanced stuff, I hear." The words fractured and hissed. "...see any missiles... bombs?"

  "Blast. Too dark." Raf's jaw tightened. "Track's pinched. Better have a reverse gear."

  "Nope." The joke sliced cleanly through the static. "Find it and you can fly out."

  The signal died.

  "Come in." Raf hit the comm again. "I've got a shape. I'm going out."

  The crawler shuddered. The brake locked and slammed him forward. A burst of oxygen from his suit fogged the canopy. He wiped it clear with his sleeve.

  "I'm outside."

  He popped the side hatch and dropped to the ground.

  Raf scanned for a ship. Anything.

  Beyond the dust, an unnatural shape lay on the flat crevasse floor. Barely visible. A sharp spine… too sharp to be rock.

  He descended the last ridge toward it. Wind spiralled along the sheer walls, carrying a faint hiss of static, a pulse that didn't belong here. Beneath his boots, the ground rang hollow and metallic. Like iron, but heavier than ore-cart steel.

  He knelt, hooked his fingers under a dusty camouflage net, and pulled.

  Dull silver flashed beneath. Pitted. Ancient.

  The metal reacted to his touch. A faint warmth pulsing through his glove. A soft pewter glow bled across the surface.

  For a moment, he remembered drawing crayon spaceships on the floor of La Chambre Rouge, while Catharine watched the green planet through tall windows. Before everything broke.

  Goosebumps trailed along his arm.

  "A weapon spar," he whispered.

  The old hull seemed to answer, vibrating against his gloved hand.

  "Phobos?" Raf tried the dead channel. "I found it."

  No answer. Only the slow settling of red grit, and the faint impression of letters half-erased along the hull:

  GALVEX-1

  ∞∞∞

  PERICLES - Noctis Shipyards, Southern Approach

  Dust swept across the Noctis Shipyards in thick, red waves, blanketing the gantry cranes and half-built warships until they were crimson silhouettes.

  Pericles marched through it, unflinching. His long coat snapped in the wind. The same coat his father used to wear. Signal flares reflected cold flashes across his visor.

  Behind him, a hundred armoured soldiers marched in disciplined rhythm, boots thundering as they advanced toward the scaffolds. Banners displaying Strata Freya snapped in the wind: diagonal gold stripes on crimson, three vertical daggers over a black fortress silhouette.

  Ahead, across two hundred metres of open ground, Krrel's loyalists had fortified the engineering level. Blast shields glowed orange behind steel framing. The half-built destroyers loomed beyond them. Massive, skeletal, almost complete.

  The prize.

  He pictured Catharine's smile. Surely after a victory, she would not rebuff him.

  "Level your arc-rifles!" His voice tore through radio static. "Hit their blind spots! Krrel has our ships—take them!"

  His soldiers opened fire.

  The blast shields along the engineering bay flared brilliant orange as electricity slammed into them. Krrel's defenders returned fire from behind steel framing. One of Pericles's soldiers went down, then another.

  Engineers scattered through the scaffolds, their shouts drowned by the roar of weapons fire.

  Above, three levels up on the scaffold platforms where workers loyal to Krrel staged their own defence. Rivet guns. Small furnaces. Welding torches. Giant cranes swung overhead, moving with coordinated purpose. Cables broke through the haze, swinging scraps of steel like wrecking balls.

  "Hit 'em!" someone shouted from above.

  Red-hot steel rivets rained down.

  Pericles's soldiers scattered, but there was nowhere to go. The rivets pelted them like hail—burning through armour, lodging in flesh. A second stream followed, then a third. Showers of molten metal poured from the gantries.

  A support beam crashed to the ground, crushing two men.

  Pericles watched, jaw tightening. Not because of the death.

  Because of his soldiers' fragility.

  "Soft," his father used to say. "Always too soft."

  But if he could regain momentum, the defenders were still vulnerable. He stepped over a dead soldier, his boot pausing for a fraction of a second beside the corpse. An opening in the line—there.

  "Forward! The big ships are the prize!"

  His forces surged.

  For a moment, it looked like they might break through.

  Then Krrel's line surged back.

  Pericles's front line wavered, then collapsed. Unprepared troops stumbled backward as the loyalists pressed their advantage, forcing his soldiers to give ground.

  The burning rivets had bought the defenders precious seconds.

  "Kill them! For Krrel!" The loyalists levelled shock rifles from behind the steel frames. "Get the lying traitor!"

  Pericles raised his gauntlet, signalling the next wave forward.

  His forces pressed through the sparks and haze.

  The advance failed again.

  Sparks. Steel. Another line gone.

  A young soldier winced as blood trickled from his hand. Mars and its workers resisted every tactic.

  "Flank them!" Pericles barked.

  His command faltered as a metal shard tore through his thigh.

  White-hot pain blinded him. He tasted blood where he'd bitten his cheek.

  Then came the sound.

  Welding tanks igniting. Jets of flame erupting above the scaffolds.

  The shockwave sent debris spinning through the air. Flaming missiles that tore through scaffolds and men alike.

  Pericles slammed against the bulkhead of a half-built destroyer. His visor cracked. Grit scorched his lungs.

  Through the blue fire, he saw his front line erased by a ruptured tank—the impact shredding steel and bone.

  Krrel's loyalists surged like a tide, rifles flashing in disciplined bursts.

  Through the cracked visor, Pericles saw his father's eyes staring back at him.

  Always watching. Always waiting for him to fail.

  A young lieutenant, barely more than a boy, dragged a fallen comrade past him.

  Pericles's command died in his throat.

  To order a stand now was to sign their death warrants.

  Blood painted his boots.

  "Fall back!" someone screamed. "Leave the wounded!"

  Pericles staggered to his feet, gripping a fallen banner pole for balance. His own troops retreated through the collapsing gantries, boots slipping on molten rivets.

  "Regroup at the crater's rim!" he roared, making the call that would save the remnants of his force.

  Bolts of electricity boiled the air around him.

  He turned toward the palace transport, dust swirling like blood around his visor.

  His gaze swept the carnage one last time.

  Lips curled over his teeth.

  His father always turned away.

  ∞∞∞

  CATHARINE - La Chambre Rouge

  Catharine felt the explosion before she heard it.

  Closer this time. The shockwave shuddered through the palace foundations, rattling the tall windows of La Chambre Rouge.

  She braced herself against the console. The holographic display flickered and died. Krrel's hand swept across it, sending memory crystals scattering across the marble like broken glass. The last lines of his loyalist forces dissolved into static.

  Krrel didn't move. He stood rigid before the panoramic window, eyes lifted toward the cold gleam of Phobos.

  "Hellas Planitia was Mars's first fortress," he said. "It sheltered my great-grandfather. That is where we will regroup."

  "You have no force left in the capital that can match Pericles," Catharine said, her words tight with urgency. She turned toward the window.

  His posture straightened. A slow, deliberate smile touched his lips.

  "I do." He finally turned from the window, his gaze sharp as fractured crystal. "You underestimate the pieces still in play. As Pericles does."

  "You cannot mean the miners." Her jaw clenched. "Father, they're not soldiers—"

  "They will provide the labour to construct my final weapon," his voice was cutting. "And witness their king's victory."

  Krrel lifted his arm, fist tightening until blue veins ridged his forearm. "And become our new armies. Armed. Armoured. Expendable."

  Catharine's gaze shifted to the window, shoulders tense. The dust storm was thinning, revealing black smoke on the horizon. Pericles's carnage in the shipyards at Noctis. "And when you're done with them? You'll cast their survivors back to the dust of Pavonis."

  He reached out and gently tilted her chin. His touch was cold. "I may make a princess of you yet."

  "I would never break my word to them." She pulled away, her hand finding his arm in a final, desperate plea. "Father, please. Honour your pledge. Show them one king still has honour."

  "This is the old Mars." He swept a hand toward the window, encompassing the smouldering horizon. "To preserve a world, sometimes you must let a city burn. Strategy requires sacrifice."

  His voice dropped to a venomous whisper. "And a strategic retreat is simply an invitation for your enemies to follow you into the dark."

  He turned toward the archway.

  Paused at the threshold, one hand against the carved alloy frame.

  "My beautiful daughter," he said softly.

  Catharine's breath caught. For a moment, she thought—

  Krrel removed a locket from his vest and opened it. Inside, a lock of golden hair.

  Trianon's hair.

  "This palace will be called Trianon."

  Catharine raised her hand as if she could stop the words.

  Too late.

  He stepped back. "After the daughter I loved."

  He turned and left La Chambre Rouge, his stride that of a man departing a concluded meeting, not a falling throne.

  He did not look back.

  Catharine stood alone in silence. Her heart pounded.

  There—in the northern sky—a glint of silver cut a pale arc above the horizon. A ship descending from high atmosphere, moving with a grace no Martian craft possessed.

  It banked toward the shipyards at Noctis.

  Rafael.

  "Father..." she whispered.

  But Krrel was already gone.

  Catharine pressed her palm to the cold glass and watched the silver arc bend toward Noctis.

  Beautiful as a falling star.

  And just as fatal.

  ∞∞∞